Considering most people put current EHR adoption somewhere in the 10-20% range, I found this part of the article on Healthcare IT news pretty interesting:

Fifty-nine percent of providers surveyed said they have already implemented or plan to implement EHRs in the next 12 months but only 17 percent are participating or planning to participate in a health information exchange.

These survey results are really interesting to me since it seems to show a huge shift in people’s plans for EHR adoption. It’s the shift from asking the question “Should I adopt an EHR?” to the question “How and when should I adopt an EHR?”

Of course, it’s one thing for people to say that they are planning to implement an EHR and actually meaningfully using an EHR. I still think there’s going to have to be a lot of work on the following questions:

• Why should we implement an EHR? – To make the final purchasing decision people are still going to want to define the benefits, risks, and costs associated with an EHR
• Which EHR should we implement? – There are 300-400 EHR companies. Deciding which one will work best for a doctors office is still a major challenge.
• How can we implement an EHR successfully? – There’s a lot of details to implementation. No matter which EHR you select requires creativity, grit and flexibility or your EHR implementation is likely in trouble.

Answer these questions and you’ll be a very busy person. That’s part of my goals for this site.