Obama Wants Full EHR by 2014 | EMR and HIPAA. Full EHR by 2014 is certainly an ambitious goal but if we do not put a stake in the ground it will be 2050 and there will be little or no progress. Heathcare, and dare I say it, healthcare IT professionals, have significantly more than the usual number of naysayers ready to pipe in with a million reasons why something can't be done. With that kind of thinking we would have never gotten to the moon.
As far as there not being enough healthcare IT professionals to fill the demand, that may be true, but it also highlights another healthcare (and healthcare IT) red herring. The professions, especially law and medicine, have been drinking their own kool aide for far too long. Yes, there are unique differences between industries, but IT professionals that work across industry verticals have been meeting these challenges for decades now.
EVERY industry believes that they are so much different than everybody else and every industry requires the "learning of a new language." Healthcare may be more challenging than other industries but only incrementally so. Healthcare's challenges have more to do with antiquated thinking than with antiquated technology, although admittedly the industry is in a desperate need to upgrade both.
It is going to take a multi-disciplinary team "Manhattan Project" to get the job done and that, by definition, is going to require that healthcare open up to outside help.
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"IT professionals that work across industry verticals have been meeting these challenges for decades now"
If this is true, then why haven't they met the challenges of healthcare? Possibly because the healthcare industry is more challenging and requires a unique set of skills to implement. Otherwise, the voracious IT people would have crossed the chasm and healthcare IT would be in a much better state.
I do agree that healthcare does have antiquated thinking with even more difficult antiquated policies. However, this is actually why healthcare IT is so difficult. It's as much about changing thinking as it is the technology. The technology is just technology. It's the qualified individuals dressed in IT clothing that need to go into healthcare and change the mentality that are hard to find.
All of that said, I'm glad that Obama has "put a stake in the ground" in regards to EHR, because there are so many conversations we can't even begin until EHR is implemented in most doctors offices. On the flip side, having EHR implemented fully opens up a great new world of interactivity and possibility that we can now only dream about.
Posted by: John Lynn | January 15, 2009 at 09:55 PM