Home Forums Discussions General Discussion perhaps of interest: EPIC EHR market dominance

Just read this article. Thought it might be of interest here. Apologies if inappropriate.

http://medicaleconomics.modernmedic...ould-stifle-ehr-and-health-it-innovation

Thanks kurt,

To me this is great news for AC. I cannot imagine EPIC taking over the 1-10 physician group size. So this gives AC a chance to know what their target is, who they have to beat for the small office. Without getting lazy, they only have to plan for adding features as EPIC develops them, but don't have to spend a lot of time and money developing every feature. I guess they only have to be Samsung instead of trying to be Apple.

Of course, when Medicare and MedicAid have bribed every provider to be on an EHR, they will pass out one they made for free and say their patients have to be managed with their program and their cloud storage.

I guess I don't see what Epic is doing wrong. The govt came out with this whole MU thing, so why is selling EMRs using that money a big deal. Don't other companies have the same shot at it?

Epic doesn't need to directly take over to force AC out of business. My worry is that any dominant EMR (and at this point Epic is approaching that status) can ultimately force out the little guys because we cannot communicate with them. The tech guys here will correct me if I am wrong, but their MUMPS will never talk to our SQL.
How shall I put this without sounding harsh... I don't think AC gives a damn what features Epic includes.

Big systems have lots of users but it doesn't mean the docs like it or would choose again if they have a choice.

I'm uncertain of what the future EHR landscape looks like. But I've still got some thoughts about it.
In the long-term, the inability for direct communication between market-dominating EHRs and other EHRs might become a serious problem for the little guys; but this problem could be mitigated by having robust Health Information Exchanges.

You can use SQL Server Integration Services to pull data from MUMPS.


JamesNT

Very interesting, James. I was hoping one of you guys would jump in.
So, hypothetically, lets say a practice was using AC, and their hospital went with EPIC. Any thoughts about the challenge of creating an interface between my their EMR and the hospital?

The first thought that crosses my mind is data types. The MUMPS database treats data types very differently than other database systems. SQL Server has well defined data types such as NVARCHAR, VARCHAR, INTEGER, DATETIME, etc. whereas MUMPS has a "general data type." What this means is that as data is pulled from any given field, additional discovery may need to be done to ensure the field has an expected data type such that the data can be coerced properly into the correct data type for the destination field.

A good example is dates. Consider 4/11/2012. Is that April 11, 2012 or is that November 4, 2012?

I would have to experiment further to give additional insight. For now, that is based off what I have read thus far. My initial instinct tells me that if MUMPS treats data like I think it does, then some agreement would have to be made with data entry personnel regarding data entry protocol to ensure that as data is entered it is in an expected form such that when data is coerced into the proper type no error is given (see previous example about dates).

JamesNT