‘This is not the iPhone’

There was a great line in a New York Times story over the weekend about electronic health records and the economic stimulus.

In talking about the difficulty of implementing EHRs in physician offices, the Times quoted Dr. Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and head of the city’s Primary Care Information Project: “There’s no way small practices can effectively implement electronic health records on their own. This is not the iPhone.”

Good point. Make something easy to use and with some cachet, and people will use it. So why exactly hasn’t Apple gotten into healthcare just yet?

(Props to Candid CIO Will Weider for showing me this story.)