Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

Well, I’d been meaning to link to my friend Ducknet or as she calls her blog, The Medical Quack, for a while, but never got around to it. I figured it was about time since she’s been posting like crazy on that blog and deserved a little love.

I must admit that she posts a ton of medical related content. In fact, probably too much for me. I’m a little bit of a healthcare snob and have my preference for EMR and/or IT in healthcare. Ducknet has an incredible tech background with experience working at Intel and TabletKiosk. I’ve often turned to her on Skype to ask her details about the latest processors or the best tablet pc for my doctors to use with our EMR. She’s always been spot on.

Plus, she finds nice little nuggets of EMR industry knowledge that I hadn’t seen until now: Misys Purchases Allscripts. That’s a really interesting industry consolidation of what I would consider a very weak brand with a very strong brand. Kind of reminds me of when HP and Compaq came together (can’t remember who bought who in that one). The interesting question is which EMR software system will emerge from the Misys purchase of Allscripts.

Hopefully the Allscripts marketing team is kept in tact. I liked their use of social media to promote EMR.

Today I read an article about Misys leading healthcare into open source. I guess I can mostly agree with the idea of them leading into open source, but even Misys is taking baby steps into the open source realm. The article says that it’s going to “open source components of its proprietary Connect Healthcare solution”[emphasis added]. So, I don’t want to completely knock Misys for only making some components open source, but if we’re going to call them a leader in healthcare’s movement to open source then it needs to be more than just components. I think the real leader was VistaEMR (I think that’s it’s official name) was open sourced. Granted, I don’t think they had much choice, but that’s being a leader.

One thing that does look good for Misys is they have “hired Ryan Bloom, a founder of the Apache Portable Runtime project and a major contributor to the Apache HTTP 2.0 project.” I don’t know any specifics about Ryan Bloom, but I can tell you that the Apache open source project is a great one that I believe will power most of the web in the future.

This will be really interesting to watch as it evolves. Open source is now a pretty proven model in other software categories. Will it work for healthcare?