EMR Interfaces, MU vs Quality Care, and Data Outside EMR


I’m not sure I agree completely with this tweet. I don’t know enough about Covery My Meds to say either way. Although, I wondered if many EMRs will integrate with Covery My Meds. From my experience, EMR vendors don’t want to interface with many outside software companies. A few embrace outside companies interfacing with them. We’ll see if that changes over time.


I haven’t had a chance to look at this study yet, but did anyone think that quality of care would improve because of MU?


No doubt we’ll eventually have outside data from wellness tracking apps incorporated in EMR, but I don’t think it will ever be a free for all. There are tens of thousands of wellness apps and I don’t see doctors wanting data from just any app. They’ll want to only get data from apps they trust. That’s a high bar for most apps. Plus, once you win the trust of one doctor, you still have to win the trust of all the other doctors. There’s not a trusted third party that doctors look to for apps.

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.

3 Comments

  • Do you know what Cover My Meds is? It is prior auth work. But we found it doesn’t work that well.

    Prior auths are a major pain in the butt for clinics — which is why insurance companies have them: it’s a way to ration (yes, I said “ration”) health care.
    1. Doctor’s office doesn’t want to do it – delays, then gets on the phone for 45 min, then completes it
    2. Insurance Co denies for wrong form, wrong Dx code, etc., — more delay
    3. Patient forgets about it, moves on. (sometimes they can’t, but then they are just stuck and doc’s office has to push something through — often the nurse or case manager, which is costly to doctor’s office)

    Insurance Companies DON’T WANT THIS TO WORK WELL OR GET INTEGRATED – it will mean they have to pay.

  • I love your comment:

    “did anyone think that quality of care would improve because of MU?”

    Unfortunately, the government and the administrators believed that, which is why this country is now $40,000,000,000 more in debt, why Doctors are miserable, and why hospitals wasted huge amounts of money that could have been used for patient care, education and research.

  • Sue Ann,
    As I say in the article, I don’t really know Cover My Meds. My commentary was more about how any application would integrate with an EHR. Would it come from the EHR integrating the application or the outside company integrating with the EHR. I think the later is more likely. Thanks for your added insight into Cover My Meds. I’ll have to learn more about them.

    Kevin,
    I’m not sure the government and administrators gave it much thought. It was only $36 billion of a trillion dollar package. I think the thinking went like this. Support technology in healthcare. That sounds reasonable. Let’s add it.

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