Deaconess CIO Todd Richardson: Government didn't do us any favors with HIEs

In an interview with healthsystemCIO.com, Todd Richardson, CIO of Deaconess Health System in Evansville, Ind., talks about flaws he says are prevalent in statewide health information exchanges. "It just seems like the government didn't do us any favors when they put millions or billions of dollars into seeding all of these health information exchanges to create systems and create organizations where 75 to 80 percent of them have to fail," he says. "I've told a number of my colleagues that [the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT] should have taken all that money and got [Cerner and Epic] and all of the major healthcare centers and said, 'We're having a meeting,' and thrown the money in the middle of the table and said, 'You have one year ... Let's use that money to make this system interoperable and not build this house of cards on a health information exchange that has this random state-by-state rollout.'" Read the full interview