It's EHR, not EMR, To The Rescue

While sitting in the dentist office the other day, I perused an April 6, 2009 issue of Time magazine. The article that got my attention was “Wrong Prescription” by Scott Haig, M.D. He made a couple of points, if not totally inaccurate, they were a far stretch from practicality. So much so, that I finally decided it was time for me to start my Healthcare IT blog, an idea that I've been tossing around for about a year.

In his viewpoint article, he ascertains “that the Obama administration thinks it has discovered a magic bullet in the drive to lower health-care costs: electronic medical records (EMR).” Firstly, the current administration plan calls for the implementation of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) not EMRs. The media toss these two terms around interchangeably however there is a difference. Electronic Medical Records vs. Electronic Health Records: Yes, There Is a Difference, a HIMSS Analytics white paper by Garets and Davis described it best, “the EMR is the legal record created in hospitals and ambulatory environments [or any provider's environment] that is the source of data for the EHR. The EHR represents the ability to easily share medical information among stakeholders and to have a patient’s information follow him or her through the various modalities of care engaged by that individual. Stakeholders are composed of patients/consumers, healthcare providers, employers, and/or payers/insurers, including the government.” The EMR is for a specific provider's entity and EHR is to be shared. This ability to share a patient’s EHR among the various stakeholders is where efficiencies are gained, hence lower health-care costs.

Secondly, Dr. Haig suggested that an EMR will make it easy for a physician to create hyped-up diagnoses and inflated bills. An EMR will not make it any easier for a physician to create a hyped-up diagnosis than a blank prescription pad does. For providers that want to partake in fraudulent activities, an EMR application will not stop it, just like a copy machine doesn’t stop a person from producing fraudulent documents. So should progress in this area be stopped just because of what a small minority of sinister providers may do? I think not.

Basically, the majority of research does suggest implementation of EHR will lower health-care costs. In 2005, Health Affairs published a study, “The Value of Health Care Information Exchange and Interoperability” by Walker, Pan, Johnston, Adler-Milstein, Bates and Middleton which summarized net savings from national implementation of a fully standardized interoperability between providers and five other types of organizations [EHR] could yield $77.8 billion annually.


The bottom line is this, if we are to deliver higher quality, safer, health care at reduced costs, digital records are needed to help both providers and suppliers achieve this lofty goal.