The Mayo Health System is currently engaged in a five year long project to unify the Electronic Medical Records of all 18 hospitals and 69 clinics within their health system. Dr. Kari Bunkers is the physician leader for the project. She sat down with HealthTechnica’s Shawn Riley on KSMQ’s Health Connections this week:
Many thanks for Dr. Bunkers for taking the time to discuss EMRs and how they are being used today.
Shawn
I think everybody agrees with the benefits of EMR’s. Moving your records seamlessly between doctors while maintaining reliablity, availability, and security of the system is (obviously) the ultimate goal. However, one could say that this is “just money”. Throw enough money at an IT problem and it will mitigate itself.
How does one convey the same sense of seamless record transfer, with the manditory requirements stated above, between two disjoint, competing health organizations? To add fuel to the fire, some organizations may build their own systems, some may purchase from SW vendor A, while some may purchase from vendor B. Vendor A & B may have non-operable systems.
Personally, it seems that every hospital group is charging ahead with their own system. This would be fine if Mayo Medial could grow to cover the entire USA, and we’d all be covered. I’m sure other hospital groups would have a different say.
Bridging the gap between entities would probably best be done by a independant group, like the federal government. However, due to the inherent nature of government, the best (or workable) solution is always found. Does anybody know what’s being done to bridge the gaps? Or has this already been done?