Hopefully my readers aren’t tired of this NJ CCHIT bill. This will probably be my last post on the subject. Any future comments I’ll just update on my original post about the bill or my post on the Financial ties to NJ Bill Outlawying Non CCHIT EHR. I just had an EMR vendor who is based in New Jersey send me an email with the message they sent to Herb Conaway and their request to meet with Herb. I encourage other people to send in their feelings to Herb Conaway on this bill and I’d be happy to publish other people’s messages on this site if you’re interested.

Here’s the email sent from the New Jersey EHR vendor:

Dear Assemblyman Herb Conaway Jr.

I would like to request a small 15 minutes meeting with you on the ASSEMBLY BILL NO.3934 wherein you have suggested to impose the use of Certified EHR from January 1st, 2011.

As part of the bill, New section suggested is “No person or entity, either directly or indirectly, shall sell, offer for sale, give, furnish, or otherwise distribute to any person or entity in this State a health information technology product that has not been certified by the CCHIT.

As used in this section, “health information technology product” means a system, program, application , or other product that is based upon technology which is used to electronically collect, store, retrieve, and transfer clinical, administrative and financial health information.
Everything is fine with this bill, it is a good initiative except the FINANCIAL PART, CCHIT doesn’t certify any product based on FINANCIAL PARAMETERS, CCHIT strictly certified EHR or EMR based on clinical parameters. That is the reason why half of the CCHIT certified products don’t have PRACTICE MANAGEMENT OR BILLING PROGRAM BUILT INTO THE SYSTEM,

We , Digital Medical Billing Inc (registered under Department of Banking and Finance) are a small billing company using PRACTICE MANAGEMENT program “DigiDMS” to do billing for 32 providers’ offices, in future we shall continue to use the same program, why we would be forced to switch to CCHIT certified product when CCHIT themselves don’t have any criteria for Financial Data Handling as part of certification. On one side President OBAMA is trying to create more jobs, and wrong bill like this can eliminate 50 jobs which our company is offering.

We would like to meet you to discuss this in person with details of CCHIT certified products which don’t have BILLING SYSTEM built into their product.

Vishal
Manager
Digital Medical Billing Inc
www.dmbi.com

Full Disclosure: Digital Medical Billing is an advertiser of DigiDMS on this site.

I recently asked a developer of an EHR to do a guest post for me to tell the story of their EHR company. The guest post is a little light on the details of how the EHR came to be, but Ash does offer a good perspective about the challenge an EHR has of developing EHR software that can meet the needs of every specialty. Not to mention an EHR that works for every state.

Thanks Ash for doing a guest post and sharing about the challenge of developing an EHR software.

Advantages and Challenges of a Doctor Created EHR

Our EHR system was created in the offices of doctors who came to us requesting a documents management solution. Basically an Internist and several of his colleagues including a Pulmonary specialist, a pediatrician, and a neurologist all needed some way to scan in their paper charts into a system that could be used to retrieve those same scanned pages at a moment’s notice. We came up with DigiDMS, or Digital documents management solution.

At this point a doctor’s office can scan hundreds of pages, file those images chronologically and categorically, add digital signatures, and apply descriptions based on the type of report all by using DigiDMS. This feature alone is used by 100% of our client base because paper management is a universal need in any doctor’s office in the US.

Over the past several years the system has become incredibly more robust chiefly due to the requests made by our clients. But not all the newly added features are used by all the doctors in the way the documents management feature was as mentioned above. This is the uniqueness of our model of software design. Basically we take the technical customizations requested by our clients and sort them by priority according to the degree to which the intended feature would benefit the most number of clients within the same specialty.

There is however occasions where we make technical changes strictly for a particular specialty that would not be used by any other medical sub-specialty. For example, a dermatologist in our home state of NJ would need to be able to calculate the tax on cosmetic products sold in their office-something which few if any other specialty requires in the state of NJ. The advantage of this model is that all our clients are getting a software system which can be “customized” according to their specialty’s specific needs.

The challenge for us is trying to standardize a system for sale in the market while simultaneously trying to accommodate each client’s individual needs on a timely basis. Or to put it in other words, a dermatologist recently told me that a well known EHR company (which I will not name due to conditions of anonymity) is good at being able to sell a system to thousands of doctors but only to a 65% level of satisfaction whereas a company like DigiDMS would be able to provide a system for a smaller pool of clients with a satisfaction rate closer to 95% because of our customized approach to software consulting. And therein lays the crux of the situation at hand: customization vs. standardization.

Ash Patel, DigiDMS

I’d certainly welcome other guest posts from EHR vendors interested in telling their story or highlighting other challenges in EHR development. Just fill out the Contact EMR and HIPAA form if you’re interested. As long as it’s not a sales pitch I’ll probably post it.