NEJM: Escaping the EHR Trap

From the New England Journal of Medicine: "Escaping the EHR Trap — The Future of Health IT."

Authors Kenneth D. Mandl, M.D., M.P.H., and Isaac S. Kohane, M.D., Ph.D. offer a devastating critique of health IT's current state:

Even as consumer IT — word-processing programs, search engines, social networks, e-mail systems, mobile phones and apps, music players, gaming platforms — has become deeply integrated into the fabric of modern life, physicians find themselves locked into pre–Internet-era electronic health records (EHRs) that aspire to provide complete and specialized environments for diverse tasks.

We believe that EHR vendors propagate the myth that health IT is qualitatively different from industrial and consumer products in order to protect their prices and market share and block new entrants. In reality, diverse functionality needn't reside within single EHR systems, and there's a clear path toward better, safer, cheaper, and nimbler tools for managing health care's complex tasks.

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