Editor's Corner

Welcome, everyone, to my first issue as editor of FierceHealthIT. Some of you already know me as editor of Fierce sister publication FierceHealthcare [1], our daily publication serving healthcare executives. With federal programs pushing EMR initiatives, regional health networks blossoming and enterprise health IT technologies continuing to mature, it's a great time to be covering the health IT business and I look forward to getting your feedback on how to cover it right.

This week, I've been thinking about the current barriers to EMR adoption...and I've decided that they're even higher than they look. While a recent Massachusetts General study (see below) doesn't reference this directly, other researchers have noted that the adoption gap is particularly bad among very small medical groups. Thought a few visionary small group practices have become true believers [2], most are still at the tailing end of the curve, and my gut tells me that they'll stay that way for quite some time. It's still not clear yet whether cheaper, integration-lite solutions--such as hosted EMRs--will even be enough to attract small, busy practices with no full-time IT staffer to lead the way. But to be honest, I'm not optimistic. The way things are right now, even young physicians don't seem to think that current health record management methods are broken.

To take one real-life example, the three doctors in my family's primary care practice--all extremely sharp and under 35 years of age--seem to be working solely with paper records, paper tickets and (to my eye) inelegant practice management software of no special pedigree. I had thought that at their age, coming up with PDAs, camera phones and Web 2.0 afoot, they would demand a better technical solution to their workflow problems. But apparently, they're content with what they've got, or at minimum, not ready to pay for something else. As a result, they're still managing a tremendous amount of data that's trapped on dead trees. Like practices from decades ago, they still rely on--heaven help us--fax machines to transmit records to specialists. Argh.

If I were an EMR vendor, I'd be more aggressive than a truckload of pharma reps in getting medical students to test my platform (too bad you can't give EMRs out as samples). Otherwise, even today's wired young docs are likely to remain hooked on paper records. And as everyone knows, bad habits are hard to break. - Anne [3]

P.S. By the way, if your looking for mobility solutions for your enterprise, you'll want to check out our upcoming webinar "Web in Motion: Competitive Advantage through Mobile Web Applications." It will discuss the case for mobility in healthcare & showcase Sybase iAnywhere's mobility platform along with case studies and success stories. Check out the website to register [4] for free.