I previously wrote about the reasons EHR companies use to get you to buy an EHR Now. Today I came across a post that’s really similar to my idea. The post is by Evan Steele, CEO SRSsoft and it’s entitled “From EMR Vendors: Fact or Fiction?” I think that Evan does a really good job covering some of the misconceptions/lies that are being spread by overzealous EHR salespeople in regards to the HITECH act’s EHR stimulus money. My favorite one was this:

“You must act now—buy an EHR now because in order to get the money from the government, you must be using the EMR by 2011.” As with used-car salesmen, “buy now” is always popular, but you actually have until 2013 to implement and potentially qualify for the lion’s share of the incentives.

Even if you do not implement until 2014 (5 years from now), you would still be eligible for almost 80% of the money.

Back in February I posted a poll asking the question “Which EHR certification criteria should HHS use for the HITECH Act?” Of course, at the core of the question is whether HHS, ONC, David Blumenthal and co. should use CCHIT certification as the “certified EHR” criteria for obtaining EHR stimulus money. Here’s a look at the results from the poll:

I will grant you that this website probably has a bit of a readership bias against CCHIT. However, there are also a lot of CCHIT certified EHR vendors who read this blog and so that would certainly bias the voting the other direction.

With that disclaimer, I think that this poll shows a real growing trend to people wanting an alternative EHR certification to CCHIT. I’m sure that CCHIT will be one option, but I hope that the government provides another option besides CCHIT for those wanting EHR stimulus money.