ACOs will push hospitals beyond the EHR

As regulatory efforts like ICD-10 and Meaningful Use continue to march on, the vision of policy and the reality of physician experience don't always line up. That was the key take away from The Art of Medicine, a panel discussion hosted by Nuance in Boston, Massachusetts this week. The physicians said that one problem with electronic health records is they require physicians to enter a prohibitive — and irrelevant — amount of detailed information, because they're designed with billing and coding, rather than patient care in mind. When it takes too long to enter that information, hospitals end up with either bad records or a backed-up workflow.