The Speed of Light is Obsolete

The healthcare IT provisions of the ARRA have a lot of dollars attached to them. Elligibility for the payments starts in 2011 to the tune of 2M/hospital (acute care) and 18K/physician (ambulatory). Elligibility for the money is based on the definition of "meaningful use" of an EMR and that's interesting because "meaningful use" is yet to be defined.

From everything I hear the HIMSS Analytics group has good reason to believe that level 4 in their EMR adoption model will probably be a part of the definition. Level 4 is basically the implementation of your main ancillaries (Lab/Rad/Pharmacy etc...), a clinical data repository, bedside medication verification and CPOE (computerized physician order entry) rolled out. CPOE only has to be in one department however. Based on the low percentage of hospitals at level 4 right now there is a lot of debate if it'll be scaled back to level 3.

The speed of implementation is important because healthcare IT doesn't move at the speed of light. It moves at the speed of adoption. We're at level 3 in my organization so to get to level 4 we need to roll out CPOE. CPOE is a physician's tool. To be successful you need the buy in of the physicians and all of the folks that they work with on a daily basis from nurses to office managers.

There is a lot that can be done with technology to facilitate this. Make it easy to use, ensure that it performs well and ensure that it talks to the other systems. Not that this is easy. There's enough here to keep any IT manager a bit nutty given the complexity of these systems and the workflow that they support. We have enterprise architecgture and technology roadmaps to coordinate these pieces.

Now we just need a roadmap for physician adoption....