Poor Integration Between Hospital EHRs And NICUs

Responding to my story about lack of funding for electronic health records for pediatric nursing homes, Brian Carter, a superb neonatologist at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, notes:

The limits of meaningful use for HITECH also exclude all of my patients – newborns and young children (age 2 or less). These children, especially those managed in neonatal intensive care units, comprise a significant portion of the pediatric population dependent upon medical technology – even upon their discharge home – and are affected by complex and sometimes chronic diseases of childhood (pulmonary, cardiac, gastrointestinal and neurologic). Neonatal ICUs have long utilized EHRs, but often this occurred in large hospitals that either didn’t develop or adapt EHRs system-wide, or had a different system for other units of care. Today, many hospitals are hampered by EHR adoption, and many NICUs by having to integrate a smoothly operating NICU-oriented EHR system into the new broader hospital EHR, or totally refit or rebuild the NICU system and lose years of meaningful and accessible data.