Lawsuits Will Eventually Drive EHR Adoption?

In the recent #HITsm chat, tireless patient advocate Sherry Reynolds offered this intriguing tweet:

The first question I’d ask based on this tweet is when will EHR become the “standard of care.” I’m sure that some could argue that now based on the $36 billion in EHR incentive money that the government is spending. However, even the most optimistic EHR adoption numbers are at 50% and I’d put it closer to 30% with ambulatory EHR dragging that number down. With that said, what would it take to have EHR as the standard of care that a doctor provider? I’m not a lawyer, but I know a number of healthcare lawyers read this blog. I hope that some of them will chime in with their thoughts.

Sherry’s last comment about not having the lab results points more towards the exchange of healthcare data being the real issue a doctor could face. Not only would this be a potential lawsuit issue for doctors, but at some point enough patients will ask this question as well. I’m sure most doctors aren’t worried since we’re pretty far from that tipping point.

I do think that doctors are quite attune to liability and can be a very big motivating factor for them. I think the same will happen with insecure text messaging in healthcare. The first couple lawsuits against a doctor for sending PHI over text and we’ll see widespread adoption of secure text platforms.

While I can see some of the realities that Sherry tweeted about, a part of me really hates to think that fear of lawsuits would end up being the driving force behind EHR adoption.

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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