A Ring Around the EHR and Health IT Twittersphere

One challenge that many bloggers face is creating good titles for all of their posts. I usually don’t have too much problem creating one. Although, I have to admit that when I do my weekend Twitter round ups, I often do have a problem coming up with a title. I don’t like them all to be essentially the same. Maybe I’ll just do the top two stories in the title in the future and then say and more… I mostly mention that because of the creative title above.

Ok, enough discussion of blog titles. Let’s get to the meat of the tweets that I found. A number of these are really substantial pieces of news. So, take a look and enjoy.


I’m sure many might be wondering why this is in an EMR and health IT roundup. The EMR mentioned in the tweet is not electronic medical record. However, if you love tech, you’ll be amazed at that post. It’s such a great illustration of how what Amazon is doing with EC2 and their other “cloud” services is going to continue lowering the costs for so many internet services.

I like to think about it this way. How many servers are running at maximum capacity all the time? The answer is none of them. In fact, many of them often use some small percentage of what that server could process. So, that means there’s a lot of wasted processing power on servers. I think services like Amazon EC2 create such an interesting model since they have so many fewer wasted resources.


Yes, this is a survey by CDW healthcare, but that’s a pretty strong number regardless of who is doing the survey.


I’ve become more and more annoyed by the way our current payment system causes so many perverse incentives. It really makes me want to find ways to change the system.


It could be the most overlooked. Although, the question we should be asking is why is it overlooked? I think the answer is that it’s not an easy thing to understand during the selection process.


Nice job by Neil of covering Epocrates selling their EHR software. This is BIG news. Sure we could argue that Epocrates didn’t have the DNA in their company to build and sell EHR. However, this should be a cautionary tale for other EHR vendors trying to enter the market. Of course, entrepreneurs will ignore this caution and enter anyway. That’s why I love entrepreneurship.


This story was passed around on Twitter all week this last week. It probably deserves more than a tweet at the end of a Twitter round up. This is a great story about an iPad EMR saving a life, but it’s also a great story about patient information being available in emergent situations. I’ve met a number of companies that are working on this problem (including My Crisis Records who advertises on one of my sites). I think over the next 5 years we’re going to see a really dramatic change in how an emergency responder addresses a medical situation. I look forward to that day. I believe information is power and I think we can do a lot better getting them the information that will make them more powerful.

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.

1 Comment

  • Similar to “SUV kills pedestrian”, “iPad emr saves a life” is a bit ridiculous.

    Also, if you read the article, maybe the tweet headline should have been “Loud yelling physician saves a life”.

    There is no doubt a well connected, easy to use EMR is what we all want…especially if you are inside the Mayo Clinic…is there a better place to have a health issue?

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