Greedy Trial Lawyer
Doctors Without Computers (Except For Billing)
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What you and your doctor do not know about electronic medical records (EMR) systems is bad for you.
Physicians Go Haywire With EMRs, Critics Say
In a June 27 Healthleadersmedia.com entry "Healthcare Crisis: EMR Non-acceptance in the US," Bill Bysinger, principal of WGB Advisory, a health care and technology management consulting company, and co-founder of eMRnet, an EMR services company, implies American physicians have gone "haywire" when it comes to EMRs. Physicians, he says, simply do not know what is good for them or their patients electronically.Bysinger's June 27 essay opens:
It has been almost 20 years since electronic medical records systems were introduced into medical practices, yet we have the lowest adoption rate of all the developed countries in the world. Most of Europe, Japan, China, Australia and even Russia have adoption rates above 50 percent and in many countries above 90 percent.
We are supposed to be the world leader in adopting technology, but recent studies have put our practice EMR adoption rate at somewhere between 15 percent and 18 percent.
I submit the root cause of the problem is the culture of the health care industry. Health care in the U.S. especially at the practice level is a cottage industry. Medical practices don't make business decisions based on productivity or process improvement, which dominates other industries. Instead, they make decisions based on how much money do they have to spend and what will it do for the providers personally (and immediately).Bysinger closes:
We cannot be proud of the fact that we have the best physicians in the world and are ignoring the value of electronic medical records as an enabler of better care.
The U.S. is the leader in applied information technology in most industries in the world, and we stand in last place in applied health information technology among developed countries in the world. [Attention, Michael Moore] This makes me ashamed of my industry and more focused on evangelizing change in our broken practice paradigm of paper records and manual clinic information processes.
From MEDINNOVATIONBLOG
Should Americans tolerate a medical cottage industry in a digital age? We certainly do not pay cottage industry prices.
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