For quite some time new — at least a couple
of years — mobile apps have been appearing on the market to assist physicians
with key portions of their work. That’s good as far as it goes, but
unfortunately, most of these apps don’t work well with EMR systems.
To
date, EMR vendors have focused on making sure that their product will help
hospitals and health systems achieve Meaningful Use, which is of necessity one
of IT’s top priorities. Mobile apps used to access EMRs are often based
on remote access to desktops via Citrix, a solution nobody I’ve spoken with
seems to like — especially doctors, most of whom seem to find it quite awkward.
But
that approach may end up in the trash heap of history if EMRs evolve as one
physician entrepreneur predicts. Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, CMO of a new
app company called Healthfinch, believes that EMRs should be platforms upon
which multiple apps can be built. (Imagine the EMR as a operating environment
like Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android.)
Healthfinch,
which retrieves refill requests and delegates them for maximum efficiency,
is running at the Elmhurst (Ill.) Clinic. Healthfinch is extracting
data from Elmhurst’s NextGen EMR, something that NextGen didn’t offer on its
own.
From
what Berkowitz has seen, EMR vendors Allscripts and Greenwway are “leading the
charge” in opening up their platforms to allow third-party vendors to build
such apps. Good on ya, Allscripts and Greenway, but if vendors like
Cerner, Epic, Siemens and Meditech aren’t coming to the party yet, the idea of
an open API is in its infancy at best.
I don’t
know about you, but I like the idea of an EMR being broken up into
objects/apps, in theory at least. Do you think we’re going to see EMRs turn
into more of an app stack than a single piece of integrated enterprise
software? And if so, how will it work?
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