For others, the EHR is the universal record that expands upon and unites electronic medical records, which document single medical events. There are currently more than 600,000 practicing physicians in the U.S. and according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, about 17 percent of those physicians are using some form of electronic medical record technology.

High-tech companies that have not had a lot of penetration in the health care market are now eager to get a piece of the action and major players like Dell are coming up with innovative health IT platforms that will have them profiting from the waves of EMR adoption forecast in the not-too-distant future.


"Dell is now offering a complete EMR solution for the physician," Dell Healthcare spokesperson Cathie Hargett told DOTmed. "Ordinarily the physician or hospital would have to go to the EMR software provider and then a hardware provider, find someone to install the hardware in their practice and then someone else for ongoing support. That whole process can be very time consuming and it has prevented widespread adoption of electronic health records, even though the technology has been around for 15 to 20 years."

Dell also just announced their intent to acquire IT integration and data-hosting company Perot Systems, which has held a partnership with the acquiring company for several years. Dell is teaming up with Sam's Club to open a retail channel for their EMR product directed toward individual physician practices, which make up the bulk of the potential market for EMR. On the grand scale, one of Dell's early EMR adopters includes Houston's mammoth Memorial Hermann Healthcare System.

"One of the advantages of our system is that it ensures that physicians can share and exchange information not only with each other, physician to physician, but between the physician and the hospital. We now have a continuum from the retail level up through the largest hospitals and we are bridging the two and bringing in the interoperability and information exchange that they both need," said Hargett.

Vendors and government officials are very vocal about all that EMRs can do for American health care, but a more muted rumble of dissenting voices from clinicians tells a different story -- that while the technology may improve health care over time, it's certainly making many of their lives miserable right now.

Add-ons Proving Key

DOTmed also spoke with Keith Belton, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Nuance Healthcare, about Dragon Medical technology, a novel speech recognition software, which represents the kind of technological add-on that may be necessary to pave the way for increased EMR adoption in its early stages.

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