Happy Independence Day

I hope that everyone is enjoying this wonderful Fourth of July. I know I’ve had a great day so far and we’re gearing up to head to KFC and enjoy some fireworks with friends. Should be a great evening if the kids don’t get too cranky along the way.

It has been a great day for me to remember how lucky I am to live in this wonderful country. There are plenty of things that are messed up in this country, but over all the freedoms we enjoy and benefits of living in America far outweigh the down sides.

As I typed in the title of this post, I wondered what other things do I wish had their freedom when it came to the EMR world.

First thing that came to mind was data independence. How beautiful would it be if our healthcare data was independent. I’m sure the ePatients out there would love to have access to their patient data. I think they’ve made some great progress in this regard, but our systems still need to get to the point that healthcare data independence is an even bigger reality.

I also couldn’t think about the doctors that are held hostage by unscrupulous EHR vendors who are taking them for whatever money they can while they hold a doctor’s data hostage. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever wanted to leave one EMR vendor to go to another. There are some EHR vendors who do a great job of this, but most of them are terrible. Yes, most of them are large companies who are more worried about numbers than they are customers. Thus, the results aren’t pretty. Of course, the great companies out there realize the benefits of making the data available to users. Not to mention the trust that’s built with a customer when they know they could leave any time they want. That kind of customer first focus will carry through to all of the other features of the software. We need more data independence from EHR vendors.

I recently wrote a post on EMR and EHR about Technology Flourishing without the Chains of Insurance. I’m not sure if complete independence from the insurance companies is the right approach, but we need to allow more doctors to be free to be doctors. They need to have more independence from the insurance company requirements and more concerned about the health of patients. I’m not sure how we get there from here, but I applaud those many doctors who do this in the face of perverse financial incentives.

I’m sure there are many more. Let me know your thoughts about independence day and I hope you enjoy the holiday.

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.

2 Comments

  • Great post John. Very inspirational to us here in DC as we are now struggling to free ourselves from the chains of a cumbersome server and re-network our office in a serverless fashion. To be truly server-free (and thus dysfunctional IT company-free) is a glorious thing that we are striving for. I’m going to blog on our quest shortly.

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