Surveys point to struggles in adoption of EHRs

Jeff Rowe | Government Health IT | June 25, 2012

Surveys are intended in part to give researchers a snapshot understanding of what is going on in a given part of society, or any single topic. Sometimes, though, it seems more productive to consider more than one survey at once in the name of getting at potentially broader implications.

To wit, two surveys have been in the news recently. One comes from the California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF), which looked at the current use of EHRs by California physicians. The other is a recent poll conducted by KPMG LLP, an audit, tax and advisory services firm...

...As Gary Anthony, principal with KPMG Healthcare, summed it up, "In most organizations, EHR deployment will most likely be one of the most transformational projects that they've ever undertaken, as well as one of the largest investments outside of the construction of a new hospital they've ever made. Yet, many organizations view EHR as just an IT project and that may be why we are seeing multiple extensions to scope, timeline and budget."...

Open Health News' Take: 

Warning signs of the coming proprietary EHR catastrophe. The studies are as good as they go, but fail to examine the real fundamental issue. Those hospitals, clinics, and physician offices that picked open souce solutions are doing fine. The ones encountering all kinds of problems are the ones that made the mistake of purchashing proprietary EHRs. Thus both the California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF) and KPMG Healthcare entirely miss the crucial points made in the recently released report by Frost & Sullivan which we covered in the following article: "Open Source Model Needed to Rein-In "Unsustainable" Health IT Expenditures." Roger A. Maduro, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Open Health News.