Since it’s Friday and I know that many of you stop reading the site cause you’ve already headed off for the weekend, I decided I’d keep it short and sweet this Friday. Plus, hopefully this joke will give you a great laugh to start the weekend.

Whats the difference between a EHR salesman and a used car salesman? The used car salesman KNOWS when he is lying!

Now you know why I have a category on this blog called EMR sales miscommunications.

Thanks to Mark Wright from Aquarius Imaging for giving me the joke.

I think the debate over a SaaS based EMR versus a Client Server EMR is never going to end. Maybe we should just have a peace treaty and decide that whoever has a SaaS EMR is going to love the SaaS model and the benefits and features of a hosted EMR solution. The client server EMR people are going to love their in house “doctor controlled” EMR software with its inherent features and benefits.

What inspired this post? A few old threads popped up on my stats page. First, is a SaaS EMR versus Client Server EMR poll I did back in June of 2009 about which type of EMR setup people prefer. Here’s the results (as of this posting):
Client Server EMR (Client Install) – 35 Votes
Client Server EMR (Web based) – 28 Votes
Hosted Web based EMR (SaaS/ASP) – 84 Votes
Huh? – 3 Votes
Doesn’t Really Matter – 7 votes

That’s good enough as a tie for me. Probably reflects the chasm we have in EHR and EMR companies. There’s plenty of each to go around.

The above poll also led me to this post about the myth that a SaaS EHR is required to show meaningful use. I forgot that some EMR companies (or likely their sales people) were spreading these crazy myths about meaningful use.

It’s going to be a really interesting next couple months in the world of EMR sales. I have a feeling that doctors are going to hear everything imaginable from the various EMR salespeople they meet. I’ve already talked about an EMR vendor talking about being EMR stimulus ready. I think that’s a good plan for EMR vendors and will be the minimum expectation for most doctors. Probably shouldn’t be (at least for small practices), but I think that it will be. Doctors will likely want to know they at least have a chance. Most doctors are going to want to know the answer to the question, “Can your EMR software get me the HITECH act stimulus money?” EMR vendors better be prepared to answer.

The problem is that few doctors will be prepared to know if the answer they receive is factual or not. So, I’d love for people to share what they hear from EMR salespeople in the comments of this post. I’m sure we’re going to get some crazy ones, but hopefully we’ll also get some stories of quality EMR salespeople as well. Hopefully together we can help each other out and debunk any “EMR sales miscommunications” that might be happening. Especially things said by EMR salespeople about the potential EMR stimulus money.

My favorite thing I hear (although, I guess in many ways it’s my least favorite) is when an EMR salesperson says, “The government has mandated use of an EMR.” This is just not true. I’m not sure they even could mandate it’s use, but even if they could they haven’t.

If we get enough good questions, I’ll highlight them in a future post.

I’ve been exchanging emails with someone in the EMR industry who described us as going through some interesting times of hype, hope and hyperbole.

Then, they went on to say:

“I have installed (successfully and not so successfully) EMR’s and clinical systems from most vendors since the mid 90’s and found almost all vaporware looking for their next sale, but not too worried about their last.”

Thankfully, I know a couple EMR vendors that aren’t just “vaporware looking for the next sale.” Sadly, far too many of them are.

A feature of every EMR vendor is a whole multitude of sales lines. If you’ve ever talked to a EMR sales person, you know what I’m talking about. This isn’t really unique to EMR sales. The same can be said of most software that’s trying to solve complex problems.

Well, there’s one EMR vendor sales line that gets on my nerves more than any other line. Let’s take a demo of an EMR vendor’s templates. Now here’s the line that I absolutely abhor:

“You can make it do whatever you want.”

Hearing this is like hearing fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Certainly, the intent of their comment is that the EMR template creation is really flexible (and it very well might be). However, the superlative “whatever” is just wrong. Every software system has limitations and I can guarantee you that if you really start using an EMR system you’re going to bump into those limitations.

I guess my problem is using superlatives like whatever, any, all, always, etc. is just misleading and leads to what I call EMR sales miscommunication. Anytime you hear one of those things during an EMR demo (or even during an EMR training) you better start asking lots of questions.

Of course, these superlatives do a lot better job selling EMR software. I guess that’s why I’ll never be an EMR salesperson. Maybe it’s also why people seem to like reading my EMR blog posts.

I recently got the following message from a colleague who was attending HIMSS:

I overheard a couple of sales managers discussing how they have seldom had longer lists of promising prospects and shorter lists of contracts they expect to close this month.

This all goes back to my previous assertion that the HITECH Act and ARRA are actually slowing the number of EHR implementations. I expect this trend to continue throughout the rest of this year.

I’d say my nice bump in traffic also shows a similar trend. The HITECH Act and ARRA so far doesn’t seem to have increased adoption, but it certainly has increased interest in EHR. We’ll see if the increased interest in EHR ends up eventually increasing EHR adoption. Interest and education on the subject is the first step and a very good thing for the EHR industry.