Doctor Slams 'Outdated' EHRs

Electronic medical records are as outdated as pre-World Wide Web computer servers, with neither able to communicate with other sites electronically, writes a Texas internal medicine specialist who blogs under the name RangelMD. In other words, the doctor writes, EMRs are no Facebook.

"(T)he vast majority of EMR systems do not communicate with each other (nor even the outside world)," Dr. Chris Rangel writes in a recent blog post. "Not only are they often incapable of communicating with another ER or computer but even in 2012 most new EMRs don't even have an option for sharing information with other systems. This is one of the biggest paradoxes and failures of almost all EMRs."

Rangel, whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as a contractor with El Paso Hospitalist Group, says the EMR at his hospital can't send or receive information from doctor's offices, labs or outside imaging centers. "Acquiring old documentation still requires one or more phone calls, several human intermediates, a fax machine (40 year old technology) and open business hours (no luck if after office hours, on weekends, or holidays)."

In a subsequent post, Rangel explains that cloud computing makes the Facebook model worth emulating.

"It is my belief that the current isolationist EMR system is too broken to be fixed in order to create a system where every EMR is capable of communicating with every other EMR," the doctor writes. He calls for a standard database language that would essentially turn EMRs into browsers that could access data in the cloud.

Any company "that has servers that meet industry standards for safety, efficiency, reliability, and security" could then store what Rangel calls universal electronic health records, or U-EHRs. Security is an issue, the doctor writes, but not an insurmountable one.