Don’t drink the Kool-Aid: Tips for easing into medical technology if you’re afraid of EMRs

SoftwareAdvice.com recently posed the following questions to its readers in a survey format: “Are more doctors buying electronic medical records than before? Or, has the Stimulus bill only brought out the tire kickers?“. The results of the survey are available here; while the survey wasn’t scientific and it didn’t have enough participants to draw wide scale conclusions, the results do imply a general feeling of positive momentum towards the purchase and implementation of EMRs.

Kevin Clifford and I were chatting about his experiences in taking a Michigan-area free clinic live on an open source EMR and I was very interested to share it with others. Kevin said he volunteered at the free clinic because he wanted to serve his community and said that there are many other such free clinics in need of IT improvements in Michigan and elsewhere. I asked him to write a quick summary of what he did and how it worked.

One of the most popular questions that I am routinely asked about is how to get a job in the (now hot again) healthcare IT market. I was doing a little poking around on JuJu.com, a job search engine, and the nice folks there gave me some interesting statistics based on their usage patterns: IT positions make up approximately 3.5-7.0% of all healthcare jobs and this number is on the rise.

I saw this on PRweb today: Drummond Group Inc. announced today that it will submit to become a certifying body upon the release of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) requirements for certifying bodies for Electronic Health Records (EHR). Drummond Group has been approached recently by numerous EHR software and services companies that need to be certified. This may be good news for the EMR/EHR industry — a second certifying body (CCHIT was the first) has been at least announced.

John Biggs at TechCrunch says <a href=““http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/deepdyve-like-the-itunes-for-scientific-papers/>DeepDyve is like iTunes for Scientific and Papers. The DeepDyve site, launched today, offers full-text search of scientific articles along with 99 cent downloads and a subscription service that allows you to read as many papers as you’d like. Articles cost 99 cents for 24 hours and an unlimited plan for $19.99 a month. A $9.99 plan allows you to access 20 articles per month for up to seven days each.

General Electric (GE) unveiled its $250 million GE Healthymagination Fund which was created to make investments in promising healthcare technology companies. If you’ve got some good ideas and think you can get the concepts to market, start your business plan and get in line for the money. Like most VCs, they will probably be very conservative and take time to make a decision so don’t go after their money if you can find non-VC funding.

I got a note from the nice folks at Software Advice reminding us that this Friday marks the close of the first reporting period for Recovery Act funds. Any grants or loans awarded between February 17th (the signing of the bill) and September 30th will be reported in the survey (and subsequently show up at www.recovery.gov). We are all especially eager in the healthcare community to see the results of reporting to find out if the Stimulus Bill has had any impact on EMR adoption rates.

On Jan. 15, 2009 the United States Department of Health and Human Services released the final rules for the updated X12 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) transaction definitions, version 005010 to be used in conjunction with HIPAA and completed by January 2013. At the same time, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) standard has been bumped from ICD-9 to ICD-10 with a compliance date of October 2013. These aggressive compliance mandates, coupled with the close relationship between HIPAA transaction sets that can directly refer to ICD-9 or ICD-10 codes have health industry IT professionals scrambling.

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