This is an interesting piece that goes over many of the factors that are responsible for our current electronic medical record (EMR) system mess. However, it misses the most important one–the largest purchasers of EMR systems today are not physicians, but hospitals/large healthcare systems driven by their billing departments and IT departments. Their needs have consistently trumped those of physicians.

They also highlight a disturbing fact for individual physicians or smaller practices:

“The data suggests that it is likely we’ll see a sizable reduction in the number of EHR vendors listed for 2014 edition certification,” predicted Steven Posnack, director of federal policy, and Dustin Charles, a public health analyst, on the ONC’s September 13 blog post

The certification they are talking about here is Meaningful Use Stage 2. What happens to smaller practices who have invested significant amounts of money in recent years implementing an EMR system, only to find out that their system will no longer qualify for Meaningful Use (and the reimbursement that goes along with that qualification)?