ALPHARETTA, GA – Some experts are saying President Obama’s pledge of $50 billion towards the adoption of healthcare information technology overlooks a crucial piece of the EMR picture – the ability to exchange clinical information between hospitals and practices by connecting the physician EMR system with hospital IT systems.

“An EMR is like a car without roads it doesn’t have the same function,” says Robert Connely, CEO of Novo Innovations, Inc. “You have to build highways before you mass produce cars.”

In Connely’s view, the country is not done building the roads yet, so it does not have an integrated system.
Many parts are tied together, he says, but now the dots have to be connected.

 “They have to be connected first or there is no value,” Connely maintains.

Carol Gacioch, a nurse at McCain Correctional Hospital in North Carolina, says, “Each region of doctors and hospitals need to be on the same system before it can be expanded to other regions. There are many sides to having an electronic record and it involves more than just putting records online.”

Novo Innovations, based in Alpharetta, Ga., provides a technology called the Novo Grid that runs on software, called agents, which allows for the synchronization of information between hospitals and a variety of remote electronic records.

Connely says agent technology coupled with software-as-a-service and portal technologies is the future for “connecting these dots.”

Intermountain Healthcare of Salt Lake City has been using Novo’s agent software since November 2007.

Novo’s technology has helped Intermountain expand its information systems without burdening the health system’s IS staffs, says Marc Probst, CIO and vice president, information systems at Intermountain Healthcare,
“Novo allows us to bypass the job of building an interface for each EMR in our community, which is an extremely resource-intensive job that’s also non-scalable. With a minimum of effort from our team and practice staffs, practices are up and running, receiving the information they want, how they want it. And our interface team’s involvement has been minimized, which lets us continue to focus on internal projects.”

Ryan Smith, assistant vice president, e-business services at Intermountain, says these types of technologies are going to be important because organizations won’t have to maintain three or more exchanges themselves. Instead they can use one that knows how to talk to all the other ones.

Smith says he would like to see more money being spent on the more holistic picture.

“The concept of RHIOs and HIEs is not happening on any national standards basis. I think this is going to continue to be a critical missing link,” he said.

“I would like to see more value added to the proposition of EMRs.,” Smith said. “Just by virtue of having an EMR in every hospital isn’t going to reduce costs and lead to better outcomes.”

We aren’t ready to spend $50 billion on the healthcare infrastructure, adds Connely. He says that not only would standards not be ready, but also it will become a feeding frenzy for vendors.