‘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.)
That’s an easy question.Money.Although Microsoft is in the healthcare market (they are in every market), the numbers for their (Apple and Microsoft) services within the healthcare environment as it relates to EHRs just don’t even come close to the numbers generated by voluminous sales of their core product lines.So its simple. Why would they get into the vertical market of healthcare?
Small practices can effectively implement electronic health records on their own, if they choose the right ones – the ones that don’t have prohibitive upfront costs and that have actually been developed with physicians and their workflow in mind. (A good training program helps as well.) The problem is, the innovative, smaller vendors that have created these solutions don’t have the marketing budget of Apple or the industry behemoths. Often, the new technology that these EHR or practice management solutions are based on is regarded with suspicion (see the debateabout privacy concerns over at thehealthcareblog.com for just one example) which doesn’t exactly help develop the cachet that you speak of. However, with the increased publicity of EHRs that we’re currently seeing, plus the dialogue that’s started about developing effective industry standards which give practices information about implementation rather than just features, I would hope it won’t be too long before there are almost as many physicians using EHRs as there are using iPhones.