“Looking for savings in hospitals that use EMRs is short-sighted. The real payday for use of EMRs will come with interoperability. Measurable savings will be realized as middleware is installed that will allow for the electronic transmission and translation of patient records across different proprietary systems between delivery networks.” – Jim Lott, Executive Vice President, Hospital Council of Southern California, Los Angeles source

“EMRs don’t save money in standalone situations. However, EMRs will absolutely save significant money (and improve care and safety) when connected and sharing clinical information.” Johnny Walker, MBA, CPA, Founder and past CEO of Patient Safety Institute, Plano, Texas source

These two quote remind me a lot of my previous post about the real long term benefits of EMR. Interoperability is one of those benefits that we won’t see right away. In fact, we’ll see little benefit from them until we hit a critical mass of EMR implementations that it’s almost futile to share information between EMR software. Kaiser and the VA are always held up as examples of successful EMR implementations and one of the main reasons for that is that they have such broad EMR adoption that they can share the clinical information across all of their clinics.

So, YES! there is a real benefit to EMR adoption long term and it comes dressed in the name “EMR data sharing.” However, it’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t diminish the very important more quickly seen EMR benefits.

“The ideal circumstance would be the use of EMR smart cards that would be updated with every patient encounter and that can be read electronically by every medical provider treating the patient, regardless of the providers’ medical network or health plan affiliation.” – Jim Lott, Executive Vice President, Hospital Council of Southern California, Los Angeles source

I’ll admit to not being an expert on smart cards, but does anyone really think that smart cards are going to get widespread acceptance? The only thing we’ve ever gotten people to consistently carry around with them is their drivers license and even those go missing all the time. How many patients forget their insurance card? Can you imagine the front desk nightmare trying to get people to remember to bring a smart card.

Sure, the concept and the technology is great and interesting. However, the only way this is going to reasonably happen is by transferring the data in the cloud. Considering all of the various legal, political and cultural challenges associated with healthcare data I’m becoming more convinced this cloud of patient healthcare information is going to be managed by the patient.