Jan 19 , 2015

What is an Electronic Health Solution?

In my previous blog I wrote about the unenviable position of the physicians community in the United States. Continuing in that vein, I want to give you this image of how impossible their position is. Most doctors are small business owners. So they not only have the responsibility of providing care to their patients, but also have to know a lot about running a profitable enterprise. Many of these providers are not equipped to do so.

Apart from all the challenges of POSDCORB(that is short for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting and budgeting) functions as a business owner, today’s practice of medicine demands them to be technologists too. Really?

So let us quantify what they are up against. They need to have an EHR system. They need a scheduling system. They need to have medical devices integration, practice management system, e-prescription, lab interfaces, patient engagement, Tele-medicine …. and all these should be secure and HIPAA compliant. And, of course, disaster recovery and business continuity.

Confucius said “Don’t kill a mosquito with a cannon.” You could get all this under one system if you have the money to spend. And there are hospital systems that spend that kind of money. And those systems have sent a few of them into staggering losses:

But it beats me why it should cost so much. I have been in the HMS(Hospital Management Systems) business for 23 years. Back in 1991, I started a company which developed and implemented HMS systems. As of today, it is still the leading HMS vendor in South India servicing hundreds of large hospitals in India and the Middle East, some of them over 1500 beds. The cost of implementing those solutions is a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars people dish out here in the US.

The cost of subscribing to one EHR system is the lease payment of a luxury car. Even if you are able to get a “Free EHR” you still have to pay for the rest of the components. Not to mention that the “Free EHR” bombards you with advertisements. So you pay for the practice management system, the clearing house fees, and the various other systems you need to get to an efficient solution. Once you have subscribed to these solutions, you have to figure out a way to make these systems talk to each other without having to duplicate time and effort. If something goes wrong you have to call the ten different providers for their support.

How does a physician manage all this at a cost that is affordable? Should they also go into losses like the health systems? Many of you have heard about ERP systems or Enterprise Resource Planning. Businesses, especially manufacturing entities, were struggling with a plethora of activities that were needed to run a complicated enterprise. Activities included Accounting, Human Resources, CRM, Sales, Procurement, Production Distribution, and so on and so forth. Until the arrival of ERP, systems entities were struggling with disparate systems to manage these activities at much higher costs.

The physician community needs their own ERP system. A system that has all the technology ingredients necessary for running a practice efficiently. An EHR system is not enough. And we are not talking about the large multi-million dollar behemoths that are driving hospitals to the ground. We are talking about a new generation solution that is user friendly and cognitive. We at ZH Healthcare would like to call this an EHR, Electronic Health Record. And we have introduced the first of its kind, Electronic Health Record at an unbeatable price.

blueEHR combines Scheduling, Payment Platform, eRx, Labs, Pharmacy, Inventory, Clinical notes, Treatment plans, Practice management, Accounts receivable, Patient Engagement, Telemedicine including video consultation, In-patient systems and more. And we serve it to the care giving community in a multilingual cloud platform that they can use by picking and choosing the components relevant to them.