This blog was a response to a person who was trying to cobble together their own EHR system.

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This was in response to a person who wants to help a doctor with what amounts to a super-simple note-keeping system for her nursing home patients. I should note that I think the mashups of technology that this person is suggesting is pretty clever. This is obviously a bright guy who is responding to a doctors sense of the record keeping problem. This is the dangerous first step of healthcare informatics, where a geek feels like he understands the requirements, but really has only scratched the surface. What feels like a good idea to this pair will create problems later that neither of them could effectively handle.

Here is the summary of the original proposal:

Is this sufficient, and is it HIPAA-compliant?

My response (which references more of the message)

> Is this sufficient?

No. For the love of all that is good. No.

What you are talking about is a system that is designed to make -your- doctor more effective, at the express cost of the ability to have information sent to or from other healthcare providers. The notion that this is acceptable is tragic. Your doctor is simply considering rendering her note into a format that would have maximal use for herself, at minimal cost, both in dollars and effort. Because she has so few patients, there will never be enough financial incentive to justify porting this data into a form that can be merged with other patient data. In short, you are considering creating a kind of super-silo.What happens to this data when your doctor retires? What happens to this data if you are not around to support the solution? Neither of you has thought this through, or even taken the time to consider that you to not even have the needed tools to properly think it through. I would encourage you to play a long game of "what-if" sprinkled with some "what-happens-when?" so that you can fully appreciate that you have not thought this through.

In twenty years people will talk about projects like this in the same terms as people do now about doctors participating in blood-letting and refusing to wash their hands because they were "gentlemen". Your doctor is considering excusing herself from the responsibility to participate in Science and you are enabling her. The informatics community does not have that much figured out (sadly) but we know enough to say that this plan is a bad one.

Do not feel too bad. Yours is just an especially bad version of the bad decision that most doctors are making to use any proprietary EHR system. The problems that you will face will happen to most doctors in America, just a little later.

Please reconsider going down this path. I would recommend ClearHealth or OpenMRS as other simple and cheap EHR systems that you can use in your environment. But really you should look into VistA, either Astronaut or OpenVistA (which both have good licenses and OK installers) b/c the VA runs many nursing homes and VistA has a reputation of handling that use-case well.