Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

I’ve been looking through my statistics lately (which I actually do most days) and it seems like most people aren’t searching for EMR anymore. It seems like there is a shift going on in people’s minds that they are now starting to search for EHR as opposed to EMR. There’s a whole discussion on wikipedia about whether the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and Electronic Health Record (EHR) articles should be merged.

In my book they are pretty much the same in most people’s minds. Sure, some people like to argue that EHR has features that reach out to patients and allow patients to enter medical data, but most EMRs have those type of features anyway. I prefer to look at it as an EMR with a patient portal. However, the in thing to do seems to be to call a company’s EMR an EHR. The fact is that most people that have an EMR have a number of patient facing portions of their EMR. Does that make them all an EHR?

Regardless, I’m just wondering if one day I’m going to need to rename my blog to EHR and HIPAA. I’ve kind of grown fond of EMR and HIPAA, but I’m definitely not oblivious to the fact that people are starting to seach for EHR and not EMR. Renaming my blog might be a great thing to help with getting better google searches on the subject. Yes, I do enjoy having a lot of traffic to my blog. It makes me happy to think that people read my stuff and that I’m participating in at least some small way to shape the evolution of EMRs EHRs.

I did a presentation recently on an organization’s resistance to change and the effect that has on software implementation. An EHR implementation is definitely no exception. In fact, it seems that many doctors are even more resistant to change than other industries, which is why we have the roughly 10% EHR and EMR adoption rate.

In my presentation I found two images that described the challenge of adopting an EHR and resisting change very well.

Does this remind you of discussing implementation of an EHR?

This one is a great one, but might take a second to truly understand.

Did you notice the wheels in the wagon? Seems a bit like a $60,000 EHR system sitting on the shelf to me.