Digital Health Records: Toss Them Out And Start Over?

Despite the millions they've spent on digitizing medical records, many hospitals would be better off just scrapping their systems, according to an article at Hospitals & Health Networks.  "Poorly designed and poorly implemented information systems are worse than useless, worse than a waste of those millions and billions of dollars," writes Joe Flower, a healthcare futurist and CEO of The Change Project Inc., and its healthcare education arm, Imagine What If.  "As we go through rapid, serious changes in health care, poor information systems will strangle your every strategy, hobble your clinicians, kill patients and actually threaten the viability of your organization," Flower says.

Technology that promised to be a fast track to efficiency and effectiveness has instead been a drain, consuming time and money, and seriously eroded one of the most important management tools: trust, he says.  He suggests organizations evaluating their systems ask questions such as these:

• Were clinicians involved in its design?
• Does it require more work, rather than less, from your clinicians?
• Does it hide critical information?
• Is it secure?

He says interoperability, one of the biggest challenges to healthcare data-sharing, is a con--one perpetrated by vendors solely focused on market share...