Thought Provoking EMR Comment – Simple EMR but “Apped” Silly

This weekend’s thought provoking EMR comment comes from Dr. Gregg Alexander, a grunt in the trenches pediatrician, in a post he did on HIStalk Practice (which seems to be a duplicate from his blog):

“I want a beautiful [EMR] system that works as easily as my iPad and as intelligently as WebOS, one that I can start using as simply as I need and which can then be “apped” silly at my discretion”

I must admit that I LOVED the description of a simple EMR system that could be “apped” silly at his discretion. Makes you think!

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

9 Comments

  • John, first up, I appreciate your appreciation!

    Secondly, you are correct, sir: many of my posts are dually-posted on my little site and on HIStalkPractice.com. (They sometimes make a threefer, hitting ModernMedicine.com, too.) It’s a time thing.

    And C, I’d like to here address the Comment you left on my little blog re: stop the tease and show the cheese. In short – it’s coming.

    The dreaded Time Thing makes it hard to do all the demos and see all the sites I’d like, but I’ve gotten a big enough bite now to start naming names.

    The good folks over at HIStalk and HIStalkPractice, the lovely Inga and the rather infamous and inscrutable Mr. HIStalk, don’t like blatant promo pieces or sales pitch puffs. For anything I want to dual-post, I try to respect their concerns. However, as this isn’t about any one particular vendor, more about a heap of vendors doing certain things which blow my HIT skirt up. Thus, I think it’ll make the cut.

    So…coming soon, to a blog near you…

  • John & Gregg

    The key thought I would pose to you is why should a physician pay for HIT? While they are clearly the key to digitizing the clinical infoirmation & event they actually gain less than the system around them for doing the digitizing. There should be a philosophy that HIT is supplied to Physicians similar to Google, give the functionality, search, away for free and monetarize through alternate revenue stream, in googles case add revenue. If google charges a penny a search it would not be where it is today. So I hope your vendor “heap” only looks at free EMR solutions that are easy to use and install as well as critically certified. Yes we are all of the above the key though is the different approach to making money of physicians which has held up adoption. Why would a physician pay for a system when he can access one for free and the functionality is the same as we all need to meet Meaningful Use Certification?

  • Gregg,
    I understand the time thing. I have 3 EMR related blogs now:-) The only thing you might want to consider is the penalties that Google applies to duplicate content. That’s why I’ve personally avoided republishing other people’s content. I’ll excerpt stuff all the time, but a full repost I think that Google frowns upon. Of course, that’s just my 2 cents on guessing the Google.

    That part aside, I look forward to the cheese. I hope it’s the sharp kind, because it’s delicious. Time is an issue. You could make a full time job just demoing systems. Plus, the challenge is kind of as you describe in your post that you want one feature out of one and one out of another and quite frankly they start to run together if you do too many in a row.

    I’m totally with Mr. HIStalk and Inga on not having promo pieces or sales pitches, but reviews of EMR by a doctor researching EMR software are always welcome on my sites if you’re interested in guest posting. I think the key is that any legitimate review will cover good and bad things of an EMR. I can safely say this since there are absolutely good and bad things about every EMR. As long as any review clearly states any biases and covers both good and bad, then I think that content is incredibly valuable to other doctors.

  • Chris,
    I think you do have a unique approach to funding the cost of an EMR and yours along with some of the other free EMR software like Practice Fusion should be on people’s list as part of their review process. Not to mention, the ability to literally and physically test free EMR software is awesome! Driving myself is so much more valuable than the sales pitch.

  • We’re happy to provide assistance anytime someone wants to review Practice Fusion’s free EMR or talk with one of our 50,000 users across the country. Although, with our instant online access and easy-to-use features you probably won’t need much help. Just email me anytime if I can be of assistance!

    Emily Peters
    Practice Fusion

  • John…Might we be able to email directly? I’d appreciate picking your brain a bit on the blogging issues you mentioned, but don’t want to waste your blog “Comments” space with this.

    Thanks,
    Gregg

  • Gregg,
    Thanks for the link. I think an option I turned on stopped sending me the comments by email. I think it’s fixed now…I hope.

    I’ll email you to talk offline about blogging stuff.

    As far as the duplicate content, this line is why it’s confusing, “You will not be penalized for using more than one, but there are some issues that can arise that may negatively affect your rankings.”

    Negatively affecting my ranking is a “penalization” even if it wasn’t intended as a penalty. Certainly, it’s not a TERRIBLE thing to have duplicate content. Spam blogs all over have been stealing my blog content for years and I’ve done fine. You just have to be careful of the impact of having your content somewhere else will have on your site.

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