All I Want for Christmas…

My family and I are in final preparations for Christmas. It’s an exciting time for me. I love everything about the season. I don’t stress over gift giving. I wallow in the joy of getting to spend money on someone I love. I don’t mind the crowds at the mall. I love the hustle, bustle, excitement and energy with everyone running around. Add in some Christmas music that reminds me of many wonderful Christmas’ past. It’s a wonderful time to me.

As I consider Christmas, my two favorite parts of Christmas is giving someone something they’ve always wanted and dreaming of the things that I would love to get for Christmas. So, in that vain, let’s dream about what I’d want for Christmas from an EMR and Healthcare IT perspective.

1. Open EHR Systems – I wish that every healthcare IT system would embrace truly open APIs and that the healthcare data would start flowing. I can only imagine the amazing benefits to healthcare if vendors would just embrace open exchange of healthcare data. It’s the right thing to do and can also be a tremendous business opportunity.

2. Remove Healthcare’s Perverse Incentives – It always pains me to see so many perverse incentives in healthcare. I applaud the many many doctors who do the right thing regardless of the incentive. However, we’d be in a lot better position if we had more than the good nature of doctors driving things. One simple example, can we finally reimburse a doctor for their time spent on an email or video visit on a website? In a large percentage of cases that’s more than sufficient. Yet, the current healthcare incentives “force” a doctor to have you come to the office in order to get paid. That’s perverse and sad.

3. Beautiful EHR User Interfaces – I must acknowledge that we’ve made some real progress on the EHR UI. You should have seen the UI’s we were dealing with when I started blogging 7 years ago. We’re measurably ahead of where we were then. However, with 300+ EHR companies we still have a lot of room to improve the EHR user interface. EHR is the heart of a practice and the better the UI the better the heart. We all know how important a heart is to your health.

4. More Empowered and Trusted Patients – Imagine where the patient was a full participant in their healthcare. That includes being trusted and listened to by their doctor and a patient who thoughtfully considers and listens to their doctor. This is not a one sided issue. This is something that both patients and doctors can improve. There are as many belligerent patients as their are arrogant doctors. We need a good dose of humility, care and trust re infused into healthcare. I think they only way we’ll get there is for the lines of communication to open up on an unprecedented level.

Those are a few of my Christmas wishes. Whether you celebrate Christmas or some other Holiday tradition, I’d love to hear what you’d love to see happen in healthcare. And to those of you who do enjoy Christmas, Merry Christmas!

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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