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TECH: TEPR musings

I’m at TEPR, the electronic patient record conference, in lovely Baltimore Maryland. The line for the $4 latte at Starbucks is way too long, but across the street at Edie’s Deli, two eggs, home fries, scrapple, toast with jam, and a large coffee is $4.95!

I gave a fascinating talk to a packed room at 8am on Sunday about the Prescribing infrastructure and eRx. Thanks to the few brave soles who showed up!

Some other things I’m hearing…

Steve Pelton, CIO, Central Region Ministry Health care in Wisconsin (built a new 112 bed hospital) “CPOE is tough. Trying to change physician practice at the points of order entry is the biggest challenge I’ve faced in 29 years in health care IT”

David Muntz, CIO Texas Health Resources (merger of Harris Methodist in Ft Worth, Presbyterian in Dallas, Arlington Health System in 1997) Have won tons of  awards, including non-health care IT awards & their CEO talks about “1 Hospital at 13 locations, but we’re not there yet!” — “When they came together they had 400 applications and only 3 were the same. Now down to 157 of which 50 are the same” “63% of docs use their portal caregate—and we don’t demand CME, so they find it useful”

Saw a very packed talk in the “small practices” track, from Pamela Moore, a rather jovial editor at Physician’s Practice magazine. She thinks that small practices are taking off in their EMR use (somewhere between 15 and 30% now—Manhattan apparently say their 2006 general use number is 27%)…She then said that in 3 years no one would be talking about this any more “it would be like talking about having telephones” I started chortling and so did the guy next to me….I then noticed on his badge that he was a Research Director in Healthcare research at Gartner.

What does this mean? Most of the people asking questions of the hospital CIOs in the RHIO session are from the Social Security Administration!

More later, so long as I can keep stealing Ekahau’s network (weird because their competition PCTS is running a wi-fi location tracking exercise…perhaps they’re working together?)  The Conference Center has Wifi, but it’s $15 a day! I prefer free…

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4 replies »

  1. Matt,
    I was one of the folks who attended your talk on Sunday morning and wanted to thank you for giving me another way to look at ePrescribing…understanding the need for more comprehensive automation for example. It’s clear that without it, much of the promise of eRx cannot be realized. Getting access to eligibility, formulary, and medication history data at the point of care seems vital to both provider adoption and ultimately patient safety. The idealist in me finds it hard to fathom that all the players here can’t get their acts together and work towards this goal of complete automation.
    By the way, hat’s off to Edie’s Deli for their reasonable fare (although I’ve been passing on the scrapple)….food, coffee, and water prices around here are a bit too steep for my mere gov’t per diem.