Thursday, June 14, 2012

Escaping the EHR Trap — The Future of Health IT


Mandl, Kenneth, D. and Isaac S. Kohane. "Escaping the EHR Trap — The Future of Health IT." New England Journal of Medicine, 366:2240-2242, June 14, 2012.

From the article: "It is a widely accepted myth that medicine requires complex, highly specialized information-technology (IT) systems. This myth continues to justify soaring IT costs, burdensome physician workloads, and stagnation in innovation — while doctors become increasingly bound to documentation and communication products that are functionally decades behind those they use in their “civilian” life…. We believe that EHR vendors propagate the myth that health IT is qualitatively different from industrial and consumer products in order to protect their prices and market share and block new entrants. In reality, diverse functionality needn't reside within single EHR systems, and there's a clear path toward better, safer, cheaper, and nimbler tools for managing health care's complex tasks." Read more