In yesterday's "Informed Patient" article in the Wall Street Journal, author Laura Landro points out the sad state of EMRs in terms of use in today's smaller practices and talks about an expected approval this weekend by the AAFP of a plan to rectify this.
On Saturday, the American Academy of Family Physicians is expected to approve a plan to pursue development of an "open-source electronic health record." Doctors using the system would be able to create electronic medical records for a nominal cost, maintain them in a secure Internet site, and easily share them with patients and other physicians.
Color me skeptical on this one. It sounds great in the abstract...a medical association throwing it's weight behind some software which will, in turn, provide it with the "juice" to overcome physicians' trepidation about funcationality, security and long-term support issues. In reality, that's going to be a tough nut to crack.
The AAFP system will use an "open source" software model, which won't charge license fees and can run on any existing equipment the doctor has....While clearly many technological details have yet to be worked out, privacy concerns should not be among them. Dr. Kibbe says patients can rest assured that their electronic records will be secure, encrypted and stored in such a way that it would be impossible for anyone to identify the data.
Those kind of statements really scare me. Aren't we confusing "open source" with "free" here? Also, I've spent too much time working on the Internet to ever believe someone when they say something would be "impossible." Someone better tell Dr. Kibbe that those kind of statements often sound like more of a challange than a guarantee to certain nefarious types.
I think that the AAFP membership would be better served if the association threw its support behind the NAPCI organization that Jacob Reider highlighted yesterday at his site (in their defense, it could be that they already are, I'm sure Jacob will correct me if I'm wrong). I agree that more leadership from practicing physicians is needed to help define what EMRs should be, and if a big assciation like the AAFP supported a standard product definition (rather than trying to "roll its own"), the software vendors would almost have to listen to what they were saying. Let the software companies do their jobs since they are more suited and motivated to build and support scalable solutions. Maybe the medical associations' money would be used more wisely by helping develop standards and then defraying the cost for the solo practitioners that they are trying to help.
9:54:40 AM 
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