Tech giants line up for e-health dollars

With billions in stimulus dollars available to help doctors and hospitals digitize their health records, it stands to reason that tech companies want to make spending that money as easy as possible.

Several of the players--Allscripts, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, and Nuance Communications--have teamed up in an alliance aimed at educating doctors on the many tools available to help set up electronic health records.

The EHR Stimulus Alliance is pulling out all the stops, with a road tour, Webcasts, telephone hotline, and other tools all aimed at demystifying the technology and showing case studies of where it has worked.

President Obama's stimulus package provides on the order of $20 billion for health care technology, with the central focus being nudging hospitals and doctors to move their records from manila folders to computers. Even with the money, though, it's seen as a daunting task.

"The EHR Stimulus Alliance is a unified movement toward turning the national dialogue surrounding the EHR transition into action," Nuance Healthcare President John Shagoury said in a statement. "Each of the partners involved has unique solutions that are crucial to EHR implementation. In our case, because most doctors speak at least three times faster than they type, speech recognition technology helps increase the meaningful use and efficiency of EHRs by decreasing physician reliance on the keyboard and mouse."

The alliance hopes to reach half a million doctors with its message.

Although the alliance represents a number of the big names in tech, there are a lot of other players in the electronic health records business, including Cerner, General Electric, eClinicalWorks, McKesson, and NextGen, as well as start-ups such as Medsphere. Other tech players also pushing hard for their piece of the industry include IBM and storage giant EMC.

By the way, I and some colleagues will have a ton more to say on this topic next week as CNET News takes an in-depth look at the push toward electronic health records.

[jake_n]

This is not good folks. You know how well protected large banks of data are. Why would you want your records stored like this if not to be more easily accessed. Do you want them searched the next time you apply for a job.

[Malcolm Allen]

The ONLY way to truely protect your records from unauthorised access or mistakes is to control them yourself. This can only be done with a P2P system that enables direct exchange of healthcare information. The only system that has the private directory required to enable this is Glynx (http://www.glynx.com). At the moment we have not put in the templates for healthcare records but wait.
I have worked on Medical Records for 15 years so know the benefits they can bring but I have worked with many providers (eg in the UK) to know the disasters that can happen if trust is left in the hands of healthcare providers or the government.

[jmchugh00]

I've worked in the healthcare industry since 2000 and I've seen firsthand how well electronic health records work when implemented properly. This is a great starting point to helping the healthcare industry. The next step will be when all these competitors create open standards for easily sharing and transferring the records from one system to another. FYI: It's upsetting to not see Sage (http://www.sagehealth.com) mentioned as an EHR vendor. We are one of the leading providers of electronic health record solutions in the United States.

[HITDiva]

Ina maybe you missed this news, but software vendor, Compuware and AMDIS launched meaningfuluse.org on May 12. Now the HIT community has a single community to discuss and influence this topic. Check it out: http://www.meaningfuluse.org.

[21stCenturyRox]

I use Microsoft's HealthVault (http://www.healthvault.com/Personal/index.html) and think it's pretty great. I'm not any more concerned about security than I am with banking -- I pay attention, but I also decided what to enter and what to keep to myself. It's already saved me some time and mental energy dealing with my doctor, and I take my health more seriously. This seems like the way to go to me.