open source EHRs

Although the health care industry has made great strides in health IT, large numbers of providers remain slow to reap the benefits of a “digital transformation”. Health care organizations focus on what they get paid for and neglect other practices that would improve care and security. At conferences and meetings year and after year, I have to listen to health care leaders tediously explode the same myths and explain the same principles over and over. In this article I'll concentrate on the recent EXPO.health conference, put on in Boston by John Lynn's Healthcare Scene, where the topics of free and open source EHRs, security, and cloud migration got mired down in rather elementary discussions.

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By now, it seems abundantly clear that the vast potential offered by universal adoption of electronic health records (EHR) has not been achieved.  Indeed, the fulfillment of that potential seems a long way off.  Unsolved problems with interoperability, usability, safety, and security, to name a few, remain, and continue to pose barriers to universal adoption. There is ample evidence in the medical literature, of the unsolved problems of the EHR.  Indeed, two recent reports that offer (probably inadequate) solutions highlight the difficulties that exist with the EHR.  The proliferation of these problems has only increased with the increase in adoption of the EHR by physicians and institutions.   The Texas Medical Association has asked the (at the time) ONC, Farhad Mostashari, MD, to establish a health IT patient safety czar.1 Read More »