Electronic Health Records: Here’s What Interoperability Looks Like (Not)
NCPA recently released an Issue Brief questioning the federal government’s dominance of health information technology, especially electronic health records (EHRs). Our conclusion came from the failure of the federal government to bring about so-called interoperability between EHRs. Jonathan Bush, CEO of Athenahealth, a provider of EHRs, illustrates how appalling this failure has been:
The patient’s information was in an electronic medical record, or EMR. And getting the patient’s records from the hospital to the nursing home, Bush says, wasn’t exactly drag and drop.
“These two guys then type — I kid you not — the printout from the brand new EMR into their EMR, so that their fax server can fax it to the bloody nursing home,” Bush says. (Eric Whitney, NPR)
This is not because of some inexplicable factors that cause health care to lag every other industry in information technology. It is a direct consequence of government control of IT in health care.
