HIPAA Blog

[ Wednesday, June 09, 2010 ]

 

Big Merger in Health IT: Misys was one of the original medical information systems that pushed offered electronic medical record platforms, and merged some time ago with Allscripts, which originally focused on IT in the prescription medicine business. Now, AllscriptsMisys is merging with Eclipsys, another player in the EMR realm.

One of the hurdles for EMR adoption (and healthcare IT generally) is interoperability -- whether systems can communicate with each other, so a patient with several different providers doesn't need multiple EMRs, and the EMRs of the various providers can communicate with one another so that changes to one are picked up in the others. There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue with this as well: we want the best system to survive in the market, not have an artificial choice foisted upon us (think VHS vs Beta, or WordPerfect vs Word), but it's hard to get a product in use over a large enough population to prevent too many varieties.

This merger may turn out to be a major turning point in the standardization of EMR systems.

Jeff [9:07 AM]

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