Post-EHR Era: Bunk Buzzword or Here Before Long?

CIOs from Healthcare IT News' Best Hospital IT Departments 2016 share their take on the fate of electronic health records.

Electronic health records certainly enjoy their share of controversy and criticism. The software is hard for clinicians to use, the data therein more often than not is difficult to exchange with other systems and it appears there is little relief in sight. So it's not entirely surprising that even while EHRs are storming toward near-ubiquity among healthcare providers many forward-looking health IT professionals are already predicting the post-EHR era.

When Healthcare IT News interviewed CIOs whose teams won our Best Hospital IT Departments 2016 awards, we asked for their take on the future of EHRs. "We're kind of over this whole meaningful use thing. Everybody can do it. There are enough EHRs now to satisfy the need. We've got to look beyond that," said Keith Neumann, CIO at Roper St. Francis. (Winner's profile: #5 Large Hospital)

Neumann said that even as Roper St. Francis is undertaking a rip-and-replace enteprise transition from McKesson to Cerner. He added that the health system is looking at how to use the millions of data points it has and digest such information for decisionmaking purposes. Inspira Health is making similar moves and looking to pull data from disparate sources, including bots and social media, into its EHR, thereby shifting the focus away from the electronic medical record as a clinical tool, CIO Tom Pacek said...