Electronic Health Records
The public perception tends to be that doctors make the big bucks and live a glamorous and luxurious lifestyle. Thanks to TV shows like House, a doctors life has been made to seem relatively easy. Show up, treat the patient and get out. It seems like a great deal. Unfortunately, that is not the truth for the majority of doctors. Most doctors are actually small business owners who are running their own practices. Which means not only do they have the responsibility of providing care for their patients, but they also have to worry about running a profitable enterprise. Many of these providers, despite their brilliance at providing medical care, are not equipped to do the latter.
This is made worse, because apart from all the challenges of POSDCORB(Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting and Budgeting) functions they face as business owners, today’s practice of medicine demands them to be tech experts as well. Isn’t that too much?
What they are up against? They need to have an EHR system. Sounds easy, but it’s not, because the EHR system needs to have a lot of things as well. They need a scheduling system. They need to have medical devices integration, practice management system, e-prescription, lab interfaces, patient engagement, tele-medicine, I could keep going … and all of these need to be secure, efficient and HIPAA compliant. And, of course, they need disaster recovery and business continuity, as well as being easy to use.
Confucius once said, “don’t kill a mosquito with a cannon.” You could get all of this under one system if you have the money to spend. And there are hospital systems that spend that kind of money. And those systems have sent a few of them into staggering losses:
- Duke University Health system will shell out $700 million
- Tucson area’s largest health network racks up nearly $30 million in losses
- Wake Forest Baptist posts $78.4M operating loss for fiscal 2014
- Maine Medical Center
But why should it cost so much? Shameem C. Hameed, founder of the blue health IT Platform, has been in the HMS(Hospital Management Systems) business for 28 years. Back in 1991, when it was still very much a new subject in the eyes of the healthcare industry, he started a company which developed and implemented HMS systems. The first of its kind in India. Meaning that he was and is one of the O.G.’s in the market. As of today, it is still the leading HMS vendor in South India, servicing hundreds of large hospitals in India and the Middle East, many of them with over 1500 beds. The cost of implementing those solutions then and now is still a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars people dish out here in America.
The cost of subscribing to an EHR system is similar to the lease payment of a luxury car. Even if you are able to get a “Free EHR”, it’s not really free, because you still end up having to pay for the rest of the components. Not to mention that the “Free EHR” comes with its own risks. Say you do get the “Free EHR”; this means you will have to pay for a practice management system, clearing house fees and the various other systems you will need to get to an efficient solution. Once you have subscribed to all these solutions, you then have to figure out a way to make these systems integrate with and talk to each other without losing data and having to duplicate time and effort. If something goes wrong, you have to call the ten different providers who were needed to construct this Frankenstein EHR, none of whom who are associated with each other, for their support.
[Read More: Is the EHR Market Saturated?]
How does a physician manage all this at a cost that is affordable? How are they supposed to focus on giving care when they’re having to worry about all of this? As part of the healthcare ecosystem, you have probably heard about ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning) systems.
Businesses, especially manufacturing entities, were struggling with a plethora of activities that were needed to run a complicated enterprise. Activities that included things like Accounting, Human Resources, CRM, Sales, Procurement, Production Distribution and so on and so forth. Until the arrival of ERP, systems entities were struggling with disparate systems to manage these activities at much higher costs.
The physician community needs their own ERP system. A system that has all the technology ingredients necessary for running a practice efficiently. A regular, off-the-shelf EHR system is not enough. And we are not encouraging you to buy nor are we talking about the large, multi-million dollar behemoths that are driving hospitals to the ground. We are talking about a custom EHR system. A tailor made one that gives a practice exactly the components they need, without burdening them with things that are not applicable to their needs. A system like this would be ideal, as it would allow care providers ease of mind by only having to worry about providing care and not anything else.
[Learn More: A Completely Customizable EHR system that adapts to your Unique Needs]
A system like this should be able to combine Scheduling, Payment Platform, eRx, Labs, Pharmacy, Inventory, Clinical notes, Treatment plans, Practice management, Accounts receivable, Patient Engagement, Telemedicine including video consultation, In-patient systems and more. And if you are a multinational vendor, like blueEHR is, you should be able to serve it to the caregiving community in a multilingual cloud platform that they can use by picking and choosing the components relevant to them.
With a system like blueEHR, one that is made to fit your needs while meeting your financial restrictions, doctors can worry less about being business men and instead focus on their passion: providing care.