{"id":4577,"date":"2012-05-23T20:40:36","date_gmt":"2012-05-24T02:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4577"},"modified":"2012-05-23T20:40:36","modified_gmt":"2012-05-24T02:40:36","slug":"healthit-is-terrible-thats-good-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4577","title":{"rendered":"HealthIT is terrible. That’s good news."},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave Chase:<\/a><\/p>\n

I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in health care. It\u2019s a statement that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done \u2014 apply IT to streamline processes. \u201cEstablished technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,\u201d athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said. \u201cTraditional health software now is on Medicare, being kept alive like grandma.\u201d Bush dubs this program as the \u201ccash for clunkers\u201d program for health IT leaving no doubt what his opinion is regarding the legacy vendors\u2019 solutions.
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\nWhile one might dismiss this coming from a company with a dog in the fight, the feeling is nearly universal amongst physicians who are the most important users (besides patients who are almost completely ignored). The best evidence of how abysmal legacy healthIT is, is that the market leader is having trouble getting medical practices to adopt their software even with huge subsidies from large health systems. In the course of discussions with large health systems, they share the deployment of a mega Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and how they were offering subsidies to affiliated doctors to adopt the same system. When pressed about how broadly it was being adopted by non-employee physicians (i.e., MDs who have a choice), the penetration was staggeringly low \u2014 0.2% was the average of those who shared figures. This was despite the fact that they were subsidizing 85% of the cost (the maximum allowed by Stark Law).
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\nWhen I\u2019ve spoken with doctors who have rejected the entreaties from their affiliated health systems, it\u2019s more than the expense (even after a massive subsidy, it\u2019s still several thousand dollars plus monthly costs). Rather, the complexity and lack of user friendliness is the bigger driver. A common statement one hears in healthIT conversations is that doctors hate technology or are afraid of it. Hogwash. They only hate bad technology. Consider the iPad. Doctors are one of the biggest buyers and it\u2019s not just young doctors.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Chase: I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in health care. It\u2019s a statement that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done \u2014 apply IT to streamline processes. \u201cEstablished technology is being given a federally funded new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4577"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4577"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4578,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4577\/revisions\/4578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}