I just was thinking to myself this morning that perhaps CCHIT like standards should only apply to large enterprise based facilities like hospitals and the largest of clinics. The basis for CCHIT to a large extent is to draw out data for hopefully better use of medical resources which in turn "may" save some money and "may" have a positive impact on outcomes.
Such places already have large networks, massive server rooms and teams of IT people that could and are trained well enough (one would hope) to attack such a beast. Why the hell do we need to be drawing such data from ever last little solo practice in the country? But if your hospital or residency program is recieving federal funding then perhaps they could or should get involved.
But to make all us little guys have to have such tech when nobody is going to come close to assisting us in funding all of it, both purchase as well as living with it for the rest of our lives, then screw that. And lastly, if such things can not be done without corporate welfare then that is CCHIT garbage too. Most of the these vendors and most of us small practices can not do business together without massive funding in forms of corporate welfare mostly for the enterprise based CCHIT software vendor. We'll never actually benefit or profit from any of this but they sure will. Funny how our businesses just continue to be pipelines for "other people's" (not our own) money. Screw that noise.
Now as an old theater and TV tech I certainly understand and agree with standards but how we got to TV scanning standards was much different then how we seem to be getting to CCHIT. One of the main purposes and driving forces behind old phasing out NTSC 525 lines of interlaced resolution was to make it consistant, cheap, compatable with old B&W, while using the best that private industry was developing at the same time.
Again I ask the question that many like me have raised before, why does a small vendor like Jon have to shell out most of his profits just to get the darn sticker in the first place, no less the R&D to get there and keep up? Why can't smaller offices use stuff that just works for their office? Unless the government wants to own and run all of our clinics and eat the cost of ALL of this CCHIT, then us small guys shouldn't even have to be in this in the first place. As we would say in da Bronx; "Put up or shut up".
