Why the Interest in EMR?

I’ve noticed the convergence of interest by end-users and vendors, on a few key topics which are: virtualization, cloud computing and healthcare. The ‘why’ of this is simple: there is money to be had in selling in these areas.

What’s perhaps unexpected, at least to me, is the strong convergence of how these areas overlap - meaning the selling of cloud computing, enabled by VMware, to healthcare organizations. You can see some of how this emerged at SNW from my notes from the Cloud and Virtualization summits (see www.dciginc.com for my blog entries on these topics).

What’s driving this convergence? It seems to me that the Electronic Medical Record, or EMR, is causing much of this. The promise to establish an EMR system was made by the Obama team during the primary season, and has been the focus of funding in the recent (Feb 2009) stimulus package. In Jan, in fact, Obama promised $50B in spending and targeted getting all records into electronic form within 5 years (see: http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=health_fitness&sc=health&sc2=news&sc3=&id=86262).

What is the need? Turns out that hospital systems cannot easily share patient records and information, with each other nor with physicians at point-of-care locations. This means that every time a patient is admitted to a new hospital or receives care from a new physician, he or she must repeat their medical histories, and even repeat expensive diagnostic tests and procedures like MRIs. Mistakes in medical histories account for a significant percentage of errors in patient treatment, some of which can be deadly such as when prescription medications interact.

What the Obama team recognized is that an online EMR system which keeps medical records up-to-date and available for all patients, no matter where they go for treatment, would save lives along with millions in unnecessary testing. This is a good idea. Getting it implemented will take potentially billions in new systems infrastructure, and radically change how hospitals need to manage data.

Turns out that putting the infrastructure for EMR systems into a cloud helps make patient record data universally available. Provisioning clouds with virtualization would make them more flexible and cost-effective.

So there we have it: the convergence of EMR, cloud computing and virtualization. Funded by billions of dollars in the 2009 stimulus bill.