Interview-ish article with Judy Faulkner

Courtesy of Healthcare IT News: Epic CEO Judy Faulkner talks EHR Interoperability, Need for a National Patient ID, Physician Productivity

The comment "Unique patient ID has to happen" intrigued me, because that's patently untrue.


Consider:

• We already have a national ID: Social Security Number. However, that doesn't account for recent immigrants or tourists. 
• It's possible that every single person living on planet Earth may visit the United States at some point and while visiting may need health care. 
• You'd need to be able to account for >7,000,000,000 people (and counting). 
• Tourists may visit the USA multiple times and years apart, and they can't be expected to remember an MRN.
• A national ID does no good if the potential exists for one patient to have multiple IDs. Within a single hospital, Patient Merge gets used all the time. If you've ever had to deal with Patient Merge AND Care Everywhere, then you know the problems that arise when a hospital can't match the person to the chart. Multiply that by the entire nation. Or the entire planet. 
• Biometrics are unique and they can't be forgotten because they don't have to be remembered in the first place. 
• A national (international?) database of biometric information with bi-directional interfaces to every hospital system will need to be created and maintained.
• Remember Obamacare?

That seems a good place to stop. Discuss. 

Go-Live Gone Wrong, Continued

I saw a co-worker reading this: Epic Installation Proves More Expensive, and I read the article over his shoulder. It's a follow up to the Go-Live Gone Wrong article that I wrote about a while back. In a testament to the state of modern journalism, the only new fact is that Maine Health is spending $55 million dollars more, solely because of Epic. Most of the money is for training and retraining users, with the remainder being used for the previously planned rollout of Epic throughout the organization.

 The comments on the article are interesting--especially the one about Stockholm Syndrome amongst Epic's customers. While technically Epic doesn't have a monopoly on the industry, free-market principles don't apply to EMRs. It is just too expensive (in dollars and hours) to take one's business elsewhere if an EMR vendor doesn't deliver.