Why Thorough EHR Adoption Must Precede Population Health

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | November 3, 2014

While the healthcare industry is certainly moving away from volume to value and working to manage the health of patient populations, it does not have sufficient depth of EHR adoption to support next-generation care delivery.  Proponents and developers of population health and analytics tools may be putting the proverbial cart before the horse. At least that is the opinion of health information technology expert, Nancy Fabozzi, Principal Analyst of Connected Health at Frost & Sullivan, which recently published research finding a lack of EHR usability.

“The industry likes to talk a big talk around that because they want to sell the next-generation solution with EHRs already having been sold,” she tells EHRIntelligence.com. “The vast majority of providers are thinking of analytics, but it’s really all business intelligence using Microsoft — that’s what they have been doing.”

Case in point: The pushback against the timeline set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) to move forward with the EHR Incentive Programs, namely Stage 2 and 3 Meaningful Use.
“That’s where we are going to see the pushback in meaningful use,” Fabozzi maintains. “First of all, nobody believes that these penalties will be enacted. We have adopted these tools and spent all this money to get them. Now let’s get them to work, and then we can start to thinking about other stuff around advanced analytics.”...