One EMR Vendor’s Take on EHR Adoption and Government Intervention

In response to my post on CCHIT’s comments on the EHR Certification criteria, I got an email from Ryan Ricks. Ryan works for XLEMR and shared the following perspective on EHR adoption (or lack thereof) and the effects of the EHR stimulus money on it.

I do not want to delve into politics, but I think this is a classic example of what happens when government intrudes upon the private sector. Rather than speeding up EHR adoption, this whole process has caused the market to grind to a standstill because physicians are waiting for all of the details to become final. I’m sure other small companies have been negatively affected by this, not just us.

It has been very difficult to convince physicians to buy. I think physicians as a group are more concerned with avoiding the risk of purchasing a non-compliant system – rather than motivated by the reward of the stimulus money. Furthermore, we have noticed a significant lack of trust in the government. Many physicians don’t believe the money will be available, or they are worried about the “strings” that are attached. In addition, several physicians expressed a great deal of concern over the interoperability requirement – they want to protect their patient’s privacy.

Sadly, what Ryan describes is basically what I’ve seen happening with EHR adoption as well.

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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