The EHR Disaster: Meaningful Use

The EHR has been a disaster. We said this seven years ago. It did not take much insight to see that having physicians become typists and disregarding their patients was a dumb idea. It took, in my opinion, one of those Harvard Professors to promulgate a system that has cost billions and needlessly encumbered health care.

As MedPageToday reports:

For the first time, the leader of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has said publicly that the agency "has the opportunity" to sunset the meaningful use program in 2016. Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of CMS, made his remarks Tuesday at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Slavitt's full remarks were then posted on the CMS blog, and summarized in a series of tweets. "As any physician will tell you, physician burden and frustration levels are real," Slavitt said. "Programs designed to improve often distract. Done poorly, measures are divorced from how physicians practice and add to the cynicism that people who build these programs just don't get it. "The Meaningful Use program as it has existed, will now be effectively over and replaced with something better."

Hospitals such as New York Presbyterian have two dissonant systems, one on the Columbia side and one on the Cornell side.  They do not talk to one another.

Moreover the systems are input and measurement directed and do nothing to help the physician. They are not connected. If there is an order for Lab work, it must be faxed! Yes team, fax machines proliferate health care!

The next issue will be quality. Try and define it, try and measure it. It is in the eye of the beholder.

Washington and the ACA have raised the costs of health care with absurd programs such as meaningful use. Some one must put an end to all of this.