You are providing important information and opinion…all US Congresspeople should read it as they, and our President, have declared that there is not to be health information technology regulation…no matter how many deaths are caused by and dollars wasted on these flawed and ill conceived CPOE devices. S. Silverstein’s site should be required reading for the lawmakers. No one who has invested millions of dollars in dysfunctional CPOE devices is willing to admit their mistakes and those who criticize may find themselves the object of retaliation, as did Justen. Hospital administrators and CPOE manufacturer CEO’s with their paid booth bunnies will always blame human error and not the EHR device for an EHR/CPOE related death. The fact remains that these EHR and CPOE devices have not been subject to scientific scrutiny and their use is not based on sound (any?) scientific principles, and thus, all are experimental and the patients are guinea pigs. This is nothing but a costly experiment on patients with big bucks for CPOE manufacturers and hospital administrators (?kickbacks).

What can be done? Complain to the HHS OHRP (office of human research protection), and report all deaths, patient injury, and near misses related to CPOE and EHR dysfunction to the FDA, the Joint Commission, and your state’s health department patient safety division.

Best regards and go Justen,

Menoalittle

“I believe there will be fleeting glimpses of success in this round. But, largely, we’ll eventually recognize this “phase” was overhyped and vastly under delivered. The big installs, like Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health, will eventually come in so massively over budget that every MD and healthcare CEO will have such a nasty taste in their mouth that getting money for HcIT will be damned near impossible.”

I’ll go a step further.

I believe this phase will be seen as a time when the Management Information Systems Religion is seen as inadequate in complex environments such as clinical medicine, where its practitioners are simply out of their league. This is largely due to advancements in biomedical information science and applications, requiring cross-disciplinary expertise to manage effectively.

Difficulties in “this phase” may cause this important question to finally be asked:

“What qualifies most hospital CIO’s and IT workers to put their feet in the door of actual clinical medicine interactions, and have authority over same?”

More on this at my site http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/medinfo.htm .

“Which, I think, means this phase of electronic medical record deployments in the United States will largely be eventually written off as a failure.”

I believe there will be fleeting glimpses of success in this round. But, largely, we’ll eventually recognize this “phase” was overhyped and vastly under delivered. The big installs, like Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health, will eventually come in so massively over budget that every MD and healthcare CEO will have such a nasty taste in their mouth that getting money for HcIT will be damned near impossible.

Phase one: money comes very easy, very painful lessons learned, rudimentary groundwork laid.

Phase two: money is much harder to come by, painful lessons learned turn into decent implementation plans, and we see some smart folks come out with strong diagnosis support and error prevention intelligence software.

As I said, though, time will tell.

justen

Change this big takes time — especially in health care.