No Smooth Sailing With EHRs

While I am an ardent health information technology advocate, as an independent practitioner my personal experience mirrors the Stanford findings … so far.

Those large organizations like the Veterans Affairs Department, Mayo Clinic and Kaiser have a common management, strategic vision, capital and an employed medical staff. Implementing comprehensive IT solutions is a very different challenge in a medical community of independent hospitals, competing businesses and multiple independent provider practices with different electronic health-record system vendors, no unified management, more-limited capital, Stark restrictions, data privacy concerns and no effective health information exchange service.