Peter Beck Kim’s Other Blog

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United Healthcare Subsidiary Offers Interest Free Loans for Their EHR System, But...

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With all the money they make it appears that is the least they can do with doctors and hospitals struggling to survive in many areas of the US.  There are also many other EHR vendors who are not financed or part of an insurance company that can help as well.

via ducknetweb.blogspot.com

Interesting and disturbing post from The Medical Quack.

If I'm reading this correctly, the Ingenix subdivision of United Healthcare is offering a sweet deal for small group docs to get an EHR system: 6 months, no payments, to sign up for their version of the Allscripts-Misys electronic health record.

But it sounds like it comes with a kind of Big Brother price.

Derm offices using the system that suddenly had non-payment when the "business intelligence arm detected potential fraud."

The State of Washington using the system to "score" Medicaid claims.

I'm all for the third quoted use: Sutter Hospitals using the system to look at costs, presumably to tighten things up financially (while hopefully looking just as closely at quality). But it's a bit concerning when some of the first uses of an insurer's EHR sound more "1984" than "It's A Wonderful Life."

Filed under  //   Allscripts   EMR/EHR   Ingenix   Misys   United Healthcare  
Posted January 7, 2010
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Why PHRs Refuse To Die (via AllBusiness.com)

In the age of Facebook and Twitter, consumers will clearly not be satisfied with such a closed solution. If I can manage my entire financial life online, with all of my bank accounts, bills, and credit cards linked to each other, why do I have the results from my colorectal cancer screening and my kid's immunization records piled in a shoebox under the bed? Online consumer solutions are beginning to emerge in the form of personal health records (PHRs), and as might be expected, Google and Microsoft are leading the charge.

via allbusiness.com

EHRs/EMRs are evolving faster than the rest of American medicine, but they're not where they'll finally end up, as this repost of Darin Stewart's article in AllBusiness relates.

Remember when only geeks used personal computers? Like, the handful of kids in the whole school?

Now when pretty much everyone is familiar with blogging, microblogging, texting and social media, the demand is increasing for the medical field to do the same. Going digital is the first step -- great, guys.

But ubiquity, transparency, and convenience are where it's at. Like the rest of the world.

Filed under  //   EMR/EHR  
Posted December 2, 2009
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