Shopping for Health Software, Some Doctors Get Buyer’s Remorse

In a January 29, 2010 Huffington Post Investigative Fund Report, reporter Emma Schwartz points out some of the dark side of computerizing medical offices.

Computerizing American medical records within five years is a key goal of federal health policymakers, who have committed to dispense billions of dollars in stimulus money to doctors and hospitals that make the transition in the coming years.There are numerous examples [quoted in the article] of what can go wrong during a move to digital systems, highlighting some of the challenges for individual medical practices making the conversion.

The Bush administration first set the goal of putting most Americans’ medical records online by 2015. By 2006, the industry had begun to receive some oversight through the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), a nonprofit organization contracted by the government to certify electronic health records. The commission reviews whether companies’ products meet the operating standards they promise. It does not evaluate the firms’ financial viability, although since 2008 it has asked companies to voluntarily disclose their number of customers and how long they have been in business.

Mark Leavitt, chair of the certification commission, said evaluating the financial stability of a company poses many challenges. For example, he noted, even a big, financially successful company could decide to discontinue a software system that didn’t pan out. And merely certifying the firm’s financial strength could give doctors “a very misleading sense of security” about the future of the product they bought, he said.

Shopping for Health Software, Some Doctors Get Buyer’s Remorse | The Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

As the EMR industry matures in the US and Canada, consolidation will take place. Despite best efforts at predicting the winners and the losers, there will almost certainly be some margin for error. As Mark Leavitt states, evaluating the financial stability of a company poses many challenges. The sense of security associated with vendors being selected as a provincially certified EMR systems in Canada also provides no guarantee that these product will be available indefinitely as a result of dynamic changes shifts in the market.

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