Why The Current Impetus Toward HIT Is So Problematic

(This is more of a summary post of many previous ones.)

Solutions are too expensive.

The tendency is to advocate physicians adopt information technology in a fashion that creates chaos, and typically starts with the 10th ladder rung, rather than the first.

Approaches typically trigger loss in physician productivity not acceptable by a majority of practices.

• EMR Risks and Realities

• EMR De-installations – A Growing Trend?

• Physician Instructions on How to Plan to Fail with EMR Implementations

• Report: Stimulus Package Might Now Spur Health IT Adoption

• Another dirty secret… EMR Failures

• The “Field of Dreams” Myth and the Health Information Technology Industry

• “Field of Dreams” Entertainment in HIT

• The Open Source “Field of Dreams”

• The “free EMR from the hospital” Field of Dreams

Again, physicians are not great brick-makers or data-entry clerks. However, the basic data items are the bricks in the foundation of everything else.

• Clinicians are not data-entry clerks!

• Data granularity is important in the EMR

As I said in a previous post, If there are not fundamental process changes in how the data, originating from patients, and the physicians they trust, is created, all the elegant, higher level solutions promised by the industry and the government are likely to be little more than technotitillation.

Why advocate existing solutions that have top-down technology approaches promising a >80% failure rate delivering the data?