According to a new HIMSS Analytics report, many clinics and hospitals are behind on their transition from paper to digitized patient records. Even worse, the digital divide is alive and well with larger, urban healthcare systems faring better than smaller, rural facilities.
Now that we have that piece of sobering news, what must the industry do? RECs are an important part of the solution. I wrote yesterday's blog on pooling best practices across RECs, given that there will be stronger, more established RECs in the larger urban areas of the country. This would seem to alleviate some of the issues surrounding the digital divide. Urban RECs should reach out to the rural RECs in their state. If they are the only REC in the state, extra effort needs to be made to help out the rural facilities. Urban facilities should also reach out to their rural counterparts and enable the leveraging of their robust resources. The driver could be potential referrals or simply part of the connectivity initiative in the state.
There absolutely needs to be more communication and mindshare not just regionally or statewide, but interstate, as well. State officials should be communicating especially with their neighbors, whom they will eventually, one hopes, share clinical data. Communities should do the same because creating the statewide health information exchange requires communities to hook up and expand connectivity. We need to help one another be successful because the goal of better healthcare delivery and efficiencies will help create a healthier population in a cost-effective manner.
Granted, there are no shortcuts to implementing an EMR system. No one should attempt to take shortcuts. If there are best practices and lessons learned from your healthcare system or physician practice in terms of getting up to speed quicker after starting from ground zero, I’d like to hear what your organization was able to do with little resources and limited time.
Photo by shareski obtained via Creative Commons license.
