When you mix 200+ EMR vendors with $19 billion dollars of federal funding and send them out to chase 700,000 doctors and 5,000 hospitals what do you get? We are about to find out.
Years ago the commercial world learned that it is almost impossible to network and share date between computer systems sponsored by siloed organizations within a single company: marketing, production, distribution, HR, etc. The solution was enterprise systems (ERPs) from a limited number of vendors that cost millions and take years to fully implement.
Now we are looking to independent medical providers to acquire systems from a very large number of vendors driven by pressure to implement quickly with only limited standardization of some data and expecting to reap the full benefits of networked data.
It sounds more like a recipe for an electronic Tower of Babel than a solution for the 21st century. Am I missing something?
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