Healthcare IT is bustling with activity these days. There are big changes in the air and, only time will tell, but we may be witnessing a defining moment in HIT. Naturally, everybody involved has an opinion and some folks, yours truly included, have more than one.
Below are some of the more popular opinions amongst physicians and a considerable portion of industry analysts.
The current EHRs on the market are outdated legacy systems
This is the battle cry of every new entrant to the market. First the ASP, or web based, vendors referred to the existing client/server vendors as legacy systems. This is about to change once the iPhone EHR vendors start calling the web EHRs legacy systems. One common thing that new vendors tend to gloss over is the fact that the existing vendors did not stop writing software in 1995. Most incumbents are releasing updates and major new versions on a regular basis, and by now most Visual Basic code has been replaced by .NET and the latest Java technologies. True, here and there, you can still find MUMPS platforms, but even the VA’s VistA is in the process of getting a major upgrade towards generic web based capabilities, not to mention the futuristic bombshell veteran EHR vendor e-MDs is about to toss into the mix.Continue reading…
