By William Hyman – Users of software such as EHRs are sometimes presented with jargon laced responses that may be unique to the software world. For example, as I may have noted here before, I have long been fond of the term “upgrade” when used to mean fixing something that was never right in the first place.
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By William Hyman – In May 2015 I commented here on the then pending legislation in the House to limit the FDA with respect to the regulation of Clinical Decision Support systems (CDS). At that time there was related draft legislation in the Senate. The House subsequently passed a version of its CURES Act in July 2015 which included the Health Software section that limited FDA’s oversight.
By William Hyman – Usability, or lack thereof, has been one of the significant complaints about EHRs throughout the Meaningful Use era. Too hard to get information in, too easy to get wrong information in, too disruptive to work flow, too hard to see what information is there, excessive pop-ups, etc.
By William A. Hyman – A recent press release and report from AHRQ asserts that 87,000 lives and nearly $20 billion in costs have been saved as a result of safety improvements. This reduction in hospital-aquired conditions (HAC) is said to be “thanks in part to provisions of the Affordable Care Act”, and Medicare incentives.
By William Hyman – Recently I addressed here the issue of physicians having to use certain functions of their EHR even if they didn’t need those functions to accomplish the desired outcome. Notably, it is required under Meaningful Use to have certain prompts occur whether or not those prompts are necessary.
By William Hyman – A prevailing feature of Meaning Use (MU) is that certain things must be done by or with the EHR. Even if we assume that at least some of these dictated things are in fact important, the need to do them within or from the EHR has replaced the merit of simply doing them.
By William A. Hyman – Interoperability in the context of EHRs is much discussed, but remains somewhat loosely defined. According to the ONC definition, adopted from IEEE, interoperability is “the ability of systems to exchange and use electronic health information from other systems without special effort on the part of the user”.
Everett Dirkson, the Illinois Senator, did not actually say “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money”, although he did say he wished he had. The billions, or $4.3 billion to be exact, that I have been thinking about is the Department of Defense two year contract with Cerner, Accenture Federal and Leidos to provide an EHR to 8 hospitals in the first year and eventually 55 hospitals and 600 clinics.
By William Hyman – The recent ONC webinar on “EHR Usability & Health IT Safety” provided three interesting presentations on the design of EHRs and the influence of design on effective use.