Yesterday MEDecision’s President/COO Scott Storrer and Senior Director of Product Marketing Robyn Fritz conducted a very interesting Webinar discussing how actionable, real-time clinical information can enable the health IT industry to meet President Obama’s challenge of creating electronic health records (EHRs) by 2014. One of the things Scott and Robyn focused on was how creating smarter clinical data for more meaningful EHRs depends on increased partnerships and collaboration throughout the industry. With the challenges and opportunities the president has created for health IT, working together to ensure interoperability and bi-directional information flow is more important now than it has ever been.  

Wednesday’s Webinar also included an overview of some focus groups we conducted with providers at the recent HIMSS conference in Chicago. We set out to gauge clinicians’ feelings on the MEDecision Nexalign Clinical Summary in particular and health information exchange in general. Scott and Robyn reported some really interesting findings, primarily that the providers we spoke with understand the benefits of EHRs and health information exchange and believe that having a more complete picture of a patient and their health history can help to improve care. They also expressed some anxiety about implementing and adopting EHRs. This is a concern we’ve heard from providers for quite some time, and one we’re continuously working to alleviate. In all, the focus groups gave us a wealth of valuable feedback that we will incorporate into our planning and development processes going forward.   

I think Scott and Robyn’s Webinar was rather timely. There is definitely a growing interest in partnerships and collaboration in the industry. Health IT entities are beginning to understand that this is our most expeditious route to meeting the Obama challenge. And, based on our focus groups, providers are starting to recognize the power of EHRs, which will help to streamline adoption. This all adds up to a pretty exciting time for health IT. After years of touting the potential of our products and technologies, we have at long last been given an opportunity to show what they can do. I’m quite confident we won’t disappoint.