>>> So people who decry CCHIT, my question always is, would you rather have nothing? Because that NOTHINGNESS will leave you at the mercy of large EHR vendors and no other options but to pay thru the nose.
What do you mean by "nothing"? Before CCHIT we had over 400 vendors all with EMR systems made help physicians, all with different preferences to see patients faster and with more efficiency. They were rapidly bringing forth more powerful and less expensive programs brought on by the intense competition. We also had paper systems that have endured the passage of time and which still work to this day for many doctors.
During this time the average survival of patients went from slightly over 50 years of age in the early 19th century to closing in on 80 nowadays. Communication between physicians, hospitals, and other health care entities was progressing with the advent of the fax, and then with the internet. Standard interfaces and standard features were slowly being developed, many through the work of physician programmers. Large off-the-shelf software vendors were putting forth interfaces s.a. the one that comes with MS Access (ODBC). There were also the CCR and the HL7 formats still being developed to this day.
During those bygone years CMS/Medicare worked on their own HIT standards, mostly for billing purposes. It first developed the NSF ("National Standard Format") which worked well until they later came up with the ANSI Standard 837 format. Vendors could hook up to these formats easily and for FREE. There was no "enterprise" vendor involvement that would cause a conflict of interest which would end up with one group of professionals (EMR vendors) wanting to control and abuse another group of professionals (doctors) so as to enrich themselves.
The government also toyed around with a free, still working EMR for the VA Medical Centers that has saved the government big bucks and they claim increased the quality over their paper record system.
Why can't we have that? These initiatives were truly government sponsored and owned, and were free/inexpensive, simple, and effective.
I agree with you, gkfahnbulleh, that most of us would love to have a secure electronic highway. Google and Microsoft are working on versions of communication that can bypass anything that is being done by CCHIT. I don't understand why we can't have a GOTOMYPC or LOGMEIN version open highways. I use LOGMEIN daily and can log in using any browser- s.a. IE or Firefox to my office.
What we don't need is a set of mandated "standards" which are really rules to control the way that a physician practices medicine, to control and ration health care through the use of HIT, and to increase the work load of physicians just to satisfy some pinheads in Washington DC and to enrich the likes of Glen Tullman of Allscripts.
>>> minimum feature set
Let the customers (physicians) determine which features they want and alternatively don't want. I see this being done here on the AC website every day. We don't need HIMSS, big government, insurance companies, some nurses sipping tea around a table, a bunch of academicians making broad stroke speaches, or some EMR salesmen telling doctors how to use some obtuse workflow environment see patients and use an EMR.
Al
Last edited by alborg; 05/24/2009 9:49 AM.
