Federal Deadline Hobbling eHealth IT Rollout 99
Lucas123 writes "A federal deadline that begins next year and requires hospitals to prove they're meaningfully using electronic health records will lead to technical problems and data errors affecting patient care, say politicians and top IT professionals responsible for the deployments. Physicians and hospitals have until the end of 2011 to receive the maximum federal incentive monies to deploy the technology. If not deployed by 2015, they face penalties through cuts in Medicare reimbursements. 'I think we have nontechnology people making decisions about technology,' said Gregg Veltri, CIO at Denver Health. 'I wonder if anybody understands the reality of IT systems and how complex they are, especially when they're integrated together. You're going to sacrifice quality if you increase the speed [of the rollout].'"
Re:Fast, Good, Cheap, pick 2... (Score:3, Interesting)
Fine and well, somebody has to do it and, as you point out, per patient administration costs are lower than most (but not all) private companies.
But if you have ever worked with anyone from the CMMS or their minions, the Third Party Administrators (contractors that actually do most of the heavy lifting trying to get a bill through the system) you will understand instantly and completely what my original snarky reply was all about.
Rules that are are logically inconsistent, randomly applied and so voluminous that changing one thing requires ten committees, 4 years and numerous sacrifices of goats, virgins and cases of Diet Coke. This is what IT departments and vendors have to deal with when creating and maintaining EMS / EHR systems. All in an environment of red ink (for most of the smaller hospitals - that's another story for a day when I've doubled up on my blood pressure pills). So no, most hospitals won't make congressionally mandated guidelines for implementation. For one thing, no one will have any idea what the actual guidelines are until six weeks before the deadline. Then they'll change it again.
And then, your friends, the private insurance sector, has to come on board as well. Right. Hell, Slow, Bad and Expensive would be a best case scenario.
The Flip Side (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly there are a lot of people here posting about how the government should not be getting involved and that seems to be the bias of both the article and summary. Allow me to go into some personal experience here though. As someone who has been very ill, lack of standardized medical records and the inability of various hospitals to transfer digital copies of video and images resulted in my spending another month or so of my life in a state I would not wish upon anyone. Right now a very good friend of mine works in healthcare and they have been (I shit you not) writing down patient information on recipe cards as the one and only method of storing drug prescription info. This resulted in, by her count, several hundred patients not getting needed insulin, antipsychotics, and other drugs as a result of numerous ordering errors that were never caught and were impossible to search for. So when people say digitizing medical records in a standard fashion is going to result in problems for patients... well not doing it is resulting in the very same.
I'm not big on government interference with many parts of our lives, but they are addressing a very real problem and they're doing it with kid gloves. They did not pass regulations requiring hospitals to comply, they just tied federal funding to that compliance and gave the hospitals many years in which to get their shit together. If medical providers have not done so and are rushing about now, that is absolutely not the fault of the feds.