Mass Collaborative seems to want to take over where the Leap Frog group failed to thrive – capitalizing on the ignorance of the big picture and still no one says the Monarch has no clothes. The everyday Joe has no clue that CPOE does not mean your complete clinical documentation, not just meds ordered. No discussion on JCAHO Core Measure, zero on evidence based medicine. Uhm where is the study on Adverse Drug Events with those items?

I don’t now about you but if I am in the hospital I am less worried about a docs signature than someone hanging someone else’s meds on my IV poll or not scanning my wrist band (if I’m given one with a bar code) to ensure I am who the system says I am. This is not to say CPOE has zero merit – however its a placebo for more significant issues that await attention and education.

EMR

Here is another slant on this discussion. What if BCBS of Mass is actually seeing that the amount of documentation provide by an office EMR is allowing doctors to bill them for much higher paymnets. In the past physicians and thier office staff did not have the elctronic back-up for higher coded claims. Now with EMR documentation there is no way to refute these claims and pay a lower amount.

Excellent points Shahid. In fact, Medsphere already offers a VM of their core open source solution (OpenVista Server + CIS running on Linux). You can download the VM here: http://medsphere.org/openvista_appliance.html

Re: Legacy, you might want to think about project cost v. vendor costs. Epic typically doesn’t cost as much as what most people think. They just have that funny midwestern thing going where they actually try to estimate the whole project cost correctly and stick to their budgets. I’d guess the 10M number is what Epic is charging for their part of the whole thing. The rest is just the cost of doing a very large and comprehensive project.

Maybe TenaciousD would rather people just didn’t do anything and stuck with paper.