Dozens of vendors put up booths on the exhibit floor with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) programs or various related products. Even better, one morning was devoted to a comparative demonstration of various EMR's documenting a single patient encounter. The encounter with a diabetic with a headache was role-played before the demonstrators and the audience. The demonstrators then had to go behind stage and come out one at a time to document the encounter in 10 minutes, using their computer programs.
Results: A telling result was that every demonstration was barely finished or not yet finished after ten minutes. Few doctors want to take 10 minutes per patient for documenting the visit. Also, someone noted that the findings documented varied considerably from what actually happened at the encounter, depending on what features each record system supported.
I was pleased that Dr. Kubitchek of Asheville, N.C. did the best job of documenting the visit (in my opinion at least), using Medic AutoChart 4.5, the one that we use in Gate City. We have been very frustrated by the imperfections and inadequacies of our program and I was afraid I would go to San Fransisco and learn we had invested in the worst product available. In fact, Medic was one of the most experienced, robust and well-used product around.
That's not to say I'm pleased with AutoChart. 4.5 . Two of the main gripes I've had for a year and a half haven't been addressed by Medic and won't be for our system. They have been included in a new product, AutoChart 5 ( which is not an automatic upgrade for us even though we pay yearly product support). They are, namely, 1) that there is no easy way to look back at a prior visit and know what meds the patient was on at that time, and 2) there is no way to enter a new problem in the problem list without typing it three times: in the problem list, in subjective, and in assessment/plan sections. Those two problems are fixed in the new AutoChart 5, but I don't know how much it will cost.
I would like Medic to develop their EMR as a stand-alone product that doesn't require their Medic medical office software but could be used by all doctors. I'd also like it to have some open-architecture aspects so other vendors could build attachments to augment the system. They didn't indicate they would any time soon. Until then, they pretty much hold their customers hostage with their data bound up in proprietary databases and they haven't been very attentive to our problems over the past year.
In addition to the live competition, an award was given for technical excellence to EMR vendors. I'm not sure who judged them, but JMJ won the competition for their product, EncounterPRO, from Marietta, GA. This product is written in such a way (Active-X objects are exposed) that programmers can easily customize add-ons for their program. It can run on a local network or on the Internet. Unfortunately, they did not participate in the comparative demonstration, nor do they have more than a handful of active installations, so their product is largely untried.
Runners-up for the technical excellence awards were Shared Medical Systems and Synthesys Technologies.
