Sunday, March 15, 2009

EMR and the Stimulus Bill

There are many opinions regarding the effects of a government subsidy for EMR adoption. As I blogged earlier, my fear is this may just end up promoting older technologies and "establishment" vendors, potentially preventing smaller, innovative players from entereing the market. There also implications for open source EMR community as well.

Austin Merritt has some interesting thoughts in his article, Get Ready for EHR Failures, But Don’t Blame the Software.
He expresses concern that a free or overly subsidized EMR will not lead to meaningful use by physicians since people tend not to value somthing they did not pay for. I generally agree with this premise. However, if the "free EMR" is trully indispensible to the physician in terms of efficiency, workflow, care quaility, and is easy to use, then it will not matter if the EMR is free- it will be adopted by phyicians.

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