Walking the floor at the TEPR show this week brought home the wonders of electronic medical records. The show had a multitude of presentations on EMR use, but more than 35 years after the first EMRs were developed we're still early in the adoption cycle. Most presentations were about fairly small-scale case studies. But despite the exit of hundreds of firms from the EMR and practice management market, and the slow emergence of several dominant players, there are still plenty of new entrepreneurial companies with booths -- and not all small ones -- out on the exhibit floor.
Many of these companies have new EMR technology that, while it may be more advanced, doesn't look that dissimilar to those on show a few years back. What they lack is a customer base. But as the legacy players in practice management and small hospital IT systems have shown, in healthcare getting into the market is relatively cheap and you don't need that big a customer base to anchor a business.
One of the major problems in physician adoption of technology is the lack of familiarity with a few trusted brands and the insistence on doing everything differently than the practice or hospital down the street. The sheer number of vendors willing to support that demand for "doing it different," including those based on software from physicians who claimed that "what was on the market didn't meet their needs," means that we're a long way from getting to the status of other industries where everyone is comfortable with using a few widely-known applications. This might be a case where we have just too much good old American ingenuity. - Matthew