Soylent green, almost misspelled it again, is an outrageous analogy to some of the occult provisions in HR 3200 and the to-be-numbered Senate Bill. End of Life consultation is an HIT element for measurement possibly under the proposed Meaningful Use of EHR metrics by 2015.

I’m usually a blah-blah-blah responding type of person but preparing for electronic capture of definable analytics in healthcare is a passion that hopefully will protect my family and friends from subpar medical care and avoid “near miss” medical adventures.

I am reminded daily, how transcription error, typographical error, or machine error can impact our life – “no one is above the statistical chance for error,” said Sister Mary Margaret.

Hybrid EMR takes most of the objections out of anti-EMR sentiments that physicians have. It was designed to do three major things extremely well and non-intrusively.

First, hybrid EMR focuses on streamlining processes and workflows in the practice. As a result, communications and messaging become the workflow. Document flow and “workflow” are not “modules” or forced sets of processes. Hybrid EMR sees it as seamless, intuitive communication and information sharing across walls, offices and facilities. This often turns out to be client’s favorite aspects of hybrid EMR.

Second, hybrid EMR does not change the way that busy practitioners conduct their exams. Whether they choose to write and dictate, voice-transcribe, create specific templates or use paper forms and scan, Hybrid EMR allows practitioners to do it “their way”.

Third, hybrid EMR is not built around templates and detailed data entry. Few things frustrate busy providers more than the need for time-consuming entry in many screens and forms.

Now this may SOUND similar to claims made by traditional EMR vendors. But seeing is believing. Hybrid EMR was built on a platform of speed, in the office of a high-performance practitioner. While virtually all EMR product descriptions SOUND alike, its in HOW they work that the real differences become quickly apparent. Hybrid EMR is the only one we know of that offers risk-free pilot programs to qualified practices.

Traditional EMR forces physicians to use nested menus, pull-downs and many click boxes to document each exam. This forces physicians to change the way they conduct exams and interact with patients. The vast majority of physicians have not deployed traditional EMR for one of three reasons: 1) they have no time for all the data entry during exams; 2) they resist being forced to become proficient keyboard/mouse operators; or 3) the benefits are not worth the cost and lost productivity (revenue!).

Hope that clears up some of the questions left in the earlier article.

The summary is,
* YES, there are a lot of benefits to rolling out an online community inside the confines of your corporate network. Connecting people is a good thing.
* YES, email is inefficient, though the solution to “too much email” will involve more of an organizational (human) solution than technology–moving your emails to a web page isn’t saving anybody time.
* NO: in and of itself, the technology isn’t a game-changer.
* NO: the technology is not as important as the community. The Forresters of the world will try to frame the discussion in terms of a magic quadrant. This is a flawed approach.

Actionable goals:
* Read up on the good concepts adopted by the Web 2.0 fad. Clay Shirky is remarkably good at explaining a lot of this, you can watch recorded presentations of him if you’re not willing to read a whole book.
* If you’re tasked with rolling out an “Enterprise 2.0,” focus on building a community and use the technology best suited for that task.