Many of you are counting on your EMR vendors to qualify your organization for Meaningful Use. This is a risky strategy. Dr. Rowley has done some analysis and shown that with two exceptions, all attestations count for less than 10% market share from the EMR vendors. This means you are most likely waiting for the vendor to support meaningful use in their next release or they are supporting MU in a limited capacity.
Instead of taking the low-cost route, which often results in missed opportunities caused by delays and misrepresentation, I encourage you to explore alternative solutions that provide a more holistic view of your health data. Don’t get in the rut of having to manage multiple disparate EMR systems with siloed data. Search for systems designed to work across the enterprise and aggregate data from many systems. You probably won’t get this from your EMR vendor.
Some of the benefits of an enterprise-wide reporting system are the ability to compare performance across several EMRs. You cannot see this using reports from the EMR vendors. They are not going to expose areas of weakness. Another benefit is a more holistic view of performance across the enterprise. Since all data gets captured and transformed into a consistent format when fed to the clinical data warehouse, your organization can run reports that show performance across and between departments.
The strategic value of an enterprise-wide solution is enormous. It enables comparisons across many locations, many skillsets, broader demographics, and provides a much more statistically significant yardstick for measurement. This broader data is typically not offered by the EMR vendors.
If you really want to make your data meaningful, the prudent move is to explore enterprise-wide reporting and attestation solutions.
