It's hard to predict just how the effort to move medical records from paper to digital will shape up.
That said, a collection of business students recently gave it their best shot. As part of an annual "war game" exercise, students from such schools as Penn's Wharton School of Business took on the roles of key industry players in an effort to imagine how the battle to digitize America's health records will play out.
Among their predictions: entrenched interests will slow change, industry players will have to consolidate, and the financial pressure will need to be increased to get the industry to fully move to digital records.
"Adoption will come at a much slower speed than I think people would like," said Leonard Fuld, the consultant who organizes the yearly war games event. "Entrenched interests will resist electronic medical records for a much longer time."
Even if the intransigence abates, the industry will be able to move only so fast, Fuld said.
"If truly they gain momentum to move ahead, there's actually going to be a manpower shortage to make all that happen," Fuld said, echoing an issue raised in the first part of CNET News' three-day special report on the digital records push.
One of the other predictions is that the massive flow of dollars into this space will spur merger activity.
"It's almost a foregone conclusion there is going to be some mergers within the marketplace," Fuld said, saying that the students believed that the health care-specific tech companies such as Allscripts and Cerner might be attractive to larger firms wanting a piece of the action.
"They can't do this alone," Fuld said.
The war game exercise featured students from four schools: Penn's Wharton School of Business, the Columbia University School of Business, MIT's Sloan School of Management, and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management
Fuld said students' past predictions on other topics have often proved prescient.
Below is a short video Fuld's organization produced with excerpts from the April event.
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.- prev
- 1
- next
