Don’t Let the Dinosaur EHRs Drive Health IT into Extinction!

Next week is HIMSS16! I’m very excited to go to Las Vegas this year and see so many friends and colleagues and am ready to engage in conversations that will help drive the future of our industry. We have a lot of new technology to show at our booth - changes many of you have been asking to see in Health IT. This kind of change is now necessary because Health IT is running in circles. For too long, Health IT vendors have replaced old technology with different outdated technology. As an industry we can’t tolerate this anymore. Unfortunately, some want to benefit from keeping things from being interoperable. It is unfortunate that the technology issues that matter to most in Health IT are yet to be settled because the industry as a whole is stuck in a time warp.

You have asked for interoperability, but you still can’t get your patients’ records from their Primary Care Physician’s office because they are on different brands of software. You have asked for better user interfaces that are fast with and work intuitively, but your software vendor has just released their most recent upgrade that runs on technology from a decade ago and the UI is the same ol’ thing with a few minor cosmetic changes.

We can prove that the cynics are wrong - that it is possible to be interoperable and to have fast intuitive user interfaces in Health IT. Others will tell you that you have no choice but to use old technology. But that is, once again, wrong. You deserve better. You deserve change. And when I say change, I mean that we need to do more than upgrade to the latest version of bug-filled EHRs. We need to replace them with products built using the technologies so many of our sister industries use – technologies that are open, interoperable, reliable, and fast.

At MedicaSoft, we are committed to doing things differently. We are determined to get results. We will lower your overall Health IT costs while providing the tools clinicians need to improve outcomes. We won’t tell you how to run your hospital and say that “we know best” like some of the Health IT dinosaurs out there. What we will do is use our technology to let you practice medicine the way YOU know is best.  Show your support for new technology in Health IT at HIMSS this year. Show that you aren’t going to tolerate Health IT dinosaurs taking your money and providing outdated, expensive, hard-to-maintain systems.

Stop by HIMSS Booth #11449 and pick up one of our dinosaur buttons to let your colleagues know where you stand!

Don’t Let the Dinosaur EHRs Drive Health IT into Extinction! was authored by Brandt Welker and published in Medicasoft's CTO Blog. It is reprinted here with permission. The original post can be found here.