One day when browsing through some different EMR related websites I ran across HIMSS’s EMR Selection Toolkit. I was of course intrigued by the title since I’d heard so many good things about HIMSS and the conference that they hold. Granted it is a conference and prone to have faults, but overall I’d heard good reviews about it. I also have to thank that conference for introducing me to SensibleVision and biometric facial recognition. They are fantastic!
The EMR Selection toolkit offered the following:
The HIMSS Ambulatory EHR Selector can help you make a well-informed choice. The Selector is an on-line database of EHR products and vendors, comparing more than 375 important characteristics, including:
-Practice size
-Specialties using the product
-Software pricing
-Contract details-Product features and functions
-Regulatory compliance
-Training and supportThe HIMSS Ambulatory EHR Selector is offered to individual physician practices for an annual subscription fee of $149.
I thought that might be a nice offer until I looked on the right side of the screen. It said it had 34 available products to search. Today when writing this post I went back and now they only have 31 products to choose from. I’m not sure how this works, but I’m amazed that a group like HIMMS can only profile 31 EMR products. That is absolutely crazy. I will admit that they do have a number of good choices, but 31 seems so narrow considering all the great EMR systems out there.
Sounds like an interesting business model for me. I’ll review the characteristics of 31 EMR systems and then charge you $100 to search my review. I’d be saving doctors $49. I might just have to do that. On second thought, what if I review 31 systems and then let you decide what the information I give is worth. I’m pretty sure most doctors have $149 in their budget to save them from being stuck with the jabba the hut EMR’s of the world.
This is the most interesting medical record resource
for MD’s thinking about getting an EMR that I have seen
in several years.
Kent Willard’s Ectopic Brain has been the previous best,
but directed at Palm based stuff…
I hope you are making money with both ads and contributions. I have been to HIMSS several times
and you have seized on the key problem with them.
They want all your money up front. They are the
BIG IT players and are not at all MD centric. They
are Hospital IT centric with their eyes on the CEO
CFO or whoever has purchase authority.
All the MDs that I know that have fully functional
EMR’s of different sorts have all made them themselves
from Filemaker or Windows templates or some other
form of available software. One doc has eMDs and
he is a new youngster and another relatively young
Pain doc has recently bought eClinicalWorks after
using the same billing software that I have been using for 10 years. Compumedic from DataStrategies. It
has worked well for Medicare submission, but is tied
to Access database and now moving to SQL the MS
version.
Keep up the good work. If you know anyone who
has implemented the OpenVista system in their
office I would like to speak to them..
cbMD
la jolla california