More Comments from Marc Probst’s Talk on EMR

If you’ve had enough of my posts from a talk Marc Probst gave, then you’ll be glad to know this is the last one. There’s no hiding my respect for Marc and hearing him in person did nothing but elevate that respect for him. Some of the comments below will feel a bit random, but I thought they were interesting enough to share with you all.

Meaningful Use and Certified EHR Overlap
I asked Marc about the challenge of reconciling the overlap between the certified EHR criteria modeled after the meaningful use matrix and meaningful use itself. It seemed that they were measuring basically the same thing. Marc’s response was, “That’s a battle I lost.” Then, Marc muttered under his breathe something about certifying the software versus the users. Basically, he was in agreement and under the same confusion I’ve had in regards to the value of certifying the software related to MU versus you actually meaningful using your EMR.

Challenge for Hospital Systems
At one point Marc talked about the challenge of a hospital to adopt an EHR if they haven’t started this already. He started listing off things like a data center and encryption. The data center for a hospital is a significant challenge that takes time. I’ve been a part of the design, creation and building of a couple of data centers and infrastructure like this takes time to implement. I still believe it’s premature to purchase an EHR, but I don’t think it’s premature to plan for things like network infrastructure, data centers, etc.

Certification and Procurring the Right EMR
I had to smile when Marc, co-chair of the EHR certification workgroup, said point blank, “EHR certification is not about procuring the right EHR system.” If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you know how I feel about this subject. Glad to hear Marc say it too.

Funding and EHR Adoption
Marc was really honest when he described that IHC had 0 doctors doing CPOE. I was surprised by this since my childhood doctor was from IHC and had an EHR back then. That said, Marc made an interesting point after saying that IHC had 0 doctors doing CPOE. He proceeded to say he didn’t think the reason they hadn’t adopted CPOE yet was because of a lack of funding. It was all the other things that took time to figure out which has delayed adoption.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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