What ’s Next for Electronic Health Records?

With the Department of Justice announcement of the $155 million dollar eClinicalWorks settlement(including personal liability for the CEO, CMO and COO), many stakeholders are wondering what ’s next for EHRs.Clearly the industry is in a state of transition.  eCW will be distracted by its 5 year corporate integrity agreement.  AthenaHealth will have to focus on theactivist investors at Elliott Management  who now own 10% of the company and have a track record of changing management/preparing companies for sale.  As mergers and acquisitions result in more enterprise solutions, Epic (and to some extent Cerner) will displace other vendors in large healthcare systems.  However, the ongoing operational cost of these enterprise solutions will cause many to re-examine alternatives such as Meditech.As an engineer, I select products and services based on requirements and not based on marketing materials, procurements by other local institutions, or the sentiment that “no one gets fired by buying vendor X”.I have a sense that EHR requirements are changing and we ’re in transition from EHR 1.0 to EHR 2.0.  Here ’s what I’m experiencing:1. (Fewer government mandates) The era of prescriptive government regulation requiring specific EHR functionality is ending.  In my conversations with government (executive branch, legislative branch), providers/payers, and academia, I ’ve heard over and over that it is better to focus on resul...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs