(2009-09-28) Hospitals Helping Emr Penetration

Some hospitals are subsidizing/supporting the use of EMR systems by local doctors, including those not employed by the hospital.

Big hospitals operators like North Shore, analysts say, want to use electronic health records that share data among doctors' offices, labs and hospitals to coordinate patient care, reduce unnecessary tests and cut down on medical mistakes. But hospitals are seeking a competitive edge, too. Digital links, analysts say, can also tighten the bonds between doctors and the hospital groups that subsidize the computerized records. In most local markets, independent physicians typically have admitting privileges at more than one nearby hospital, and so hospitals compete for doctors as well as patients.

The subsidy will be 50 percent of the total cost for physicians who simply install electronic health records that can communicate between the doctor's office, labs and hospitals. But the subsidy will rise to 85 percent of the total costs of digital records for physicians who agree to share data - stripped of personal identifiers - on patient measures that include glucose levels for people with diabetes and post-operative procedures and prescriptions for heart patients. That could help North Shore amass an ever-growing database of evidence indicating which treatments and procedures yield the best medical results.

Questions/issues:

• will they let the software be used for patients who have never been in that hospital?

• will these systems be over-complicated for doctor input, because they're optimized for hospital settings?

  • the doctors might not discover this until much later, at which point they'll have to decide whether to find a new vendor, and of course, how to work across different vendors for different contexts. I think the InterOp story is pretty weak on these systems...