Goosing EMRs, and Can 700,000 Doctors Be Wrong?
Recently retired national healthcare IT coordinator Dr. David Brailer once called himself the lead goose guiding the flock in healthcare IT. Leavitt of HHS seems in no rush to replace him, though Brailer's office did get an '06 budget increase to $125 million. If one finds a quarter on the ground, that will count as much toward your retirement fund as Brailer's budget does to national IT adoption.
While a voluntary approach to EMR adoption is preferred, Dr. Brailer's inferences at HIMSS and in other speeches about a possible national sponsored healthcare system (and corresponding EMR - the antique Vista EMR used by the VA system) is unlikely under President Bush. That would also kill the EMR market of the big vendors, all of whom support HIMSS' EHR Vendor Consortium.
The political, consumer and technological heat will put doctors who don't adopt EMR out of business by 2015. Small doc practices who've had legitimate price complaints against adoption have increasingly cheap options from small vendors like NextGen and eMDs. Even the large vendors like Cerner are eyeing the small doc group market.
In the payor world, UnitedHealth scored a legal victory when a Federal judge dismissed the class-action suit against it from the 700,000 doctors who claimed the insurer unfairly cut their reimbursements. The country's largest managed care company held out for seven years for their victory, while peers Aetna, Cigna and Wellpoint settled for many millions.
Robert Seligson, president of the North Carolina Medical Society who participated in the law suit, was cited in my May 16 post, "United We Stand, Together We Fall," about UnitedHealth's allegedly abusive reimbursement practices. UnitedHealth's legal victory comes at a time when the SEC is looking into the stock option timing of CEO Dr. William McGuire.
While the judge liked what UnitedHealth had to say, Wall Street hasn't: The stock is down over 25 percent this year due to the stock timing scandal.
Tags: EMR, Healthcare+IT, Healthcare+PR, Managed+Care, Medical+PR, Online+PRPosted by Shawn Whalen on June 29, 2006 at 4:52 PM
Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
