I hope everyone has started to enjoy their holidays. I may go a little light on the content this Holiday season. Although, I’ll still be publishing plenty during the holidays. The funny thing is that this website was first created over a holiday break. Now on to my usual Sunday Twitter roundup.

Healthtech Accelerator Rock Health Peels Back The Curtain On Its Second Batch Of Startups zite.to/seKPAR via @zite #emr #healthit

— Blackford Middleton (@bfm) December 19, 2011

This is a pretty interesting list of 15 Rock Health startup companies. It’s their second batch of startup companies in the healthcare space. I talked to one of the other health startup incubators (and I know some don’t like to be called incubators) who said that they got about 100 applications. I wonder how many applications Rock Health got before they narrowed it down to this 15.

There’s definitely a lot of interesting momentum happening in the health startup area. In fact, I’m working on something related to it that could be really interesting. More on that in the new year.

@schwartzbrown very true, I’m hopeful (even though I think we’re far from this) that #EHR‘s will help w/collaboration on this info #NHDD

— renee berry (@renee_berry) December 16, 2011

I hadn’t really thought about the impact of hospitals buying up all the primary care physicians on interoperability of healthcare data. On face it seems to me that more sharing would happen since it is easier to share health data within the same company than between two different companies. However, these tweets make me think I need to do a little more thinking ont he subject.

@ehrandhit @ampilsner I am seeing & talking to lots of doctors who are wondering why #EMR products lack simple outcome & QC functions #HITsm

— Arjun Maini (@AMaini1) December 16, 2011

Doctors are wondering why EMR software doesn’t have a lot of things. I’m not sure I have a good answer to why EMR products don’t have some of the things that Arjun Maini talks about. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on it.

If you’ve had enough of my posts from a talk Marc Probst gave, then you’ll be glad to know this is the last one. There’s no hiding my respect for Marc and hearing him in person did nothing but elevate that respect for him. Some of the comments below will feel a bit random, but I thought they were interesting enough to share with you all.

Meaningful Use and Certified EHR Overlap
I asked Marc about the challenge of reconciling the overlap between the certified EHR criteria modeled after the meaningful use matrix and meaningful use itself. It seemed that they were measuring basically the same thing. Marc’s response was, “That’s a battle I lost.” Then, Marc muttered under his breathe something about certifying the software versus the users. Basically, he was in agreement and under the same confusion I’ve had in regards to the value of certifying the software related to MU versus you actually meaningful using your EMR.

Challenge for Hospital Systems
At one point Marc talked about the challenge of a hospital to adopt an EHR if they haven’t started this already. He started listing off things like a data center and encryption. The data center for a hospital is a significant challenge that takes time. I’ve been a part of the design, creation and building of a couple of data centers and infrastructure like this takes time to implement. I still believe it’s premature to purchase an EHR, but I don’t think it’s premature to plan for things like network infrastructure, data centers, etc.

Certification and Procurring the Right EMR
I had to smile when Marc, co-chair of the EHR certification workgroup, said point blank, “EHR certification is not about procuring the right EHR system.” If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you know how I feel about this subject. Glad to hear Marc say it too.

Funding and EHR Adoption
Marc was really honest when he described that IHC had 0 doctors doing CPOE. I was surprised by this since my childhood doctor was from IHC and had an EHR back then. That said, Marc made an interesting point after saying that IHC had 0 doctors doing CPOE. He proceeded to say he didn’t think the reason they hadn’t adopted CPOE yet was because of a lack of funding. It was all the other things that took time to figure out which has delayed adoption.