EHR Certification Termination – What’s It Mean?

The news recently came out that ONC had terminated the SkyCare EHR developed by Platinum Health Information System, Inc. It sounds like those that were using the SkyCare EHR were likely aware of the issues with their EHR. From reports I read, many customers had already reported that SkyCare EHR was no longer responding to them and the company had basically disappeared.

It’s always sad when this happens even when there are only a handful of doctors using this EHR. You’d think that the founders of the company would have enough integrity to provide their users as soft a landing place as possible. Plus, if they didn’t have enough respect for their users, how about respect for the patients that could be put in harms way without a soft landing. Even with the help of an EHR vendor, switching EHR software is tough. Without them it can be brutal and have all sorts of ugly consequences for a practice.

ONC certainly did the right thing to terminate the company’s EHR certification. If they hadn’t done it, then the doctors would be in an even worse situation. With the EHR certification terminated, the doctors can now apply for the exception which will allow them to avoid the EHR penalties. Of course, that doesn’t help them when it comes to the EHR incentive money which they’ll no longer receive.

I hope this is a lesson for other EHR vendors (and many more will fail). Don’t leave your EHR users high and dry. Do the right thing and help them move to a new EHR system. I’m sure there’s more to the story of why SkyCare EHR was shutdown, but I can’t imagine wanting to ever work with the Founders of that EHR in any other capacity.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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