One real life example of how implementing an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) can deliver benefits was noted by the US healthcare organization Kaiser Permanente,. They found in an internal study that the rate of heart attacks among 46,000 patients in Northern California who were 30 years and older has declined by 24 percent. Kaiser has also reduced mortality rates by 40 percent since 2008, for its hospital patients who contract sepsis, a dangerous infectious disease. Robert Pearl, executive director of Kaiser’s Permanente Medical Group, says the Electronic Health Record (EHR) had everything to do with it. “We were able to go into our databases and understand the progression of this disease and recognize why early intervention is so crucial,” he says.

Given this one example and all of the other evidence, why then is it so difficult to successfully implement an EPR, and why are Government Health departments having to provide financial incentives to make hospitals move in the right direction. Penalties also apply if they don’t implement these systems.

In 2009 $35 billion of US taxpayer’s money was made available to promote the use of health IT by physicians, hospitals, and other health providers. It’s estimated about $19 billion of that has been spent by care providers in the adoption of EHR systems.

The lack of successful EPR implementations may be linked to the usability, change management and costs associated with the major system providers. Reports of IT systems costing millions, but failing to deliver any real return on investment after years of implementation, are only too common.

In most markets if you build a better product or process users will switch to it pretty quickly and the previous way of operating will become obsolete – think VHS and DVD. It didn’t take too long for DVD to become the norm – it delivered benefits to the user over and above VHS, even though new hardware was a requirement the benefits outweighed these barriers. There were no incentives required to convince people to make the switch – it was obviously a better experience. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said in the healthcare environment.

So rather than choosing the big bang, multi million pound, long implementation EPR approach, that is not guaranteed to make things any better, it may be worth NHS Trusts considering a different more low key approach. An approach that is guaranteed to be user friendly, quick to implement and affordable – Vitro from Sláinte Healthcare can be implemented rapidly, retains the look and feel of existing paper documents and can initially be used to identify and progressively obliterate those ‘islands of paper’ that need quick wins. Vitro can then be progressively used across the hospital, integrating with all other systems.

If you provide an easy to use alternative to paper – keeping some of the positive aspects of paper but eliminating the problems – hospitals will start to see an increased adoption rate and patients will start to see the benefits they have been promised.

Canice McKee - Business Development Manager Ireland & UK, Sláinte Healthcare

Canice is responsible for growing Sláinte Healthcare’s business within the UK and Ireland. During a successful 6 years at Lincor Solutions Canice won many contracts for their bedside computing solution in hospitals across UK, Ireland and the Middle East, developing an understanding of how technology can improve patient outcomes. Canice’s background prior to becoming involved in Healthcare was in the Mobile Communications market, where he held senior global marketing positions with Nokia and sales and marketing roles with BT and Orange. Canice is a Business graduate and is a Member of the Institute of Marketing

LinkedIn: http://ie.linkedin.com/in/cmckee