The Community EHR of the Future

This is a Getting Started resources discussing the The Community EHR of the Future.

The speakers are Mark Anderson CEO, AC Group, Inc. and our roving reporter Robert "Bob" Gleeman.
Click the play button below to play this interview.

Requires Flash Player.

These are my brief notes from Mark's interview in a Yellow Cab travelling from downtown Manhatten to JFK.

Challenges is that the patient in the hospital -- Doc has to use the Hospital System which he is completely unfamiliar with. CPOE Products. Every Hospital that the Doctor goes to, he has to learn a new product - none are similar to their office EMR.

What is the Community Health Record? A new approach. Have a system where the Doc uses their usual EMR system but when they go to the Hospotal their using the same system. The Doctor doesn't have to use different systems -- all the data goes into the same system. Create one system for the Physician and easier for the ER technician, the Nurse, the Health Worker using the same data.

Timescales? Working with a think-group asking how we can roll this out to small communities. A place where they're looking to trial this is a hospital, 32 Docs, which doesn't have an existing system. Try to establish a EHR for the whole community. A Patient centric EMR for the whole community.

Are there vendors already looking at doing this? There are vendors that talk about it. There's a company called EPIC but they're not really scaleable down to the smaller hospital.

In the past we've talked about the Hospital offering the Doctor the EMR software. Is this along the same lines? Yes. The hospitals are offering a stand-alone EMR product to their employed physicians and community physicians. This goes to the next level where instead of offering an Inpatient and an Ambulatory EMR and offering one community EHR.

Who pays? Today the person that pays is the hospital -- they pick up 85% of the costs. Why? For every 20,000 ER visits we can save 1/2 million dollars per year. If the ER doctor gets all the information in a familar format, this saves the uncompensated care in the Emergency Room. A great fit.

Reimbursement. EMRupdate has quite a few posts about Medicare Reimbursement. Will this have an impact on Medicare? It is all about improvement in the Health of the Patient.

Thanks again to Mark Anderson, AC Group for supporting our Getting Started resources for Doctors Researching EMR solutions.  

For more information about the subjects discussed here you can contact Mark Anderson at the details listed below.
See our other Getting Started resources here.

Mark R. Anderson CPHIMS, FHIMSS
CEO and Healthcare IT Futurist 
AC Group, Inc.
118 Lyndsey Drive
Montgomery, TX  77316
(c) 281-413-5572
(f)  832-550-2338
email: mra@acgroup.org
web: www.acgroup.org