The High Cost Of Botched EHR Implementations
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Resignations and lawsuits are becoming more commonplace as EHR implementations fail to deliver as promised.
As Health IT Outcomes reports, president and CEO James Thaw of Athens (Ga.) Regional Medical Center resigned amid complaints from the medical staff his administration bungled the implementation of an electronic health-record system. The rollout of a Cerner Corp. EHR system went live May 4 in “most areas” of the organization, according to a news release issued at the time. Plans called for the system to extend to Athens Regional's employed physician offices and its four urgent-care centers three weeks later.
This is not the first case of a botched EHR implementation costing someone a job, or a vendor millions of dollars. Earlier this year, Cerner had to pay $106 million to settle a dispute with a North Dakota hospital that alleged its financial software did not perform as promised. In Montana, Mountainview Medical Center is suing its EHR vendor for failing to meet a contractual deadline for installation of a meaningful use-certified system. And in North Carolina, a class-action suit is in progress on behalf of up to 70,000 providers who bill Medicaid, seeking retribution for a new billing software that “shorted” the providers half a billion dollars in the first 90 days following installation.
And last year, as Health IT Outcomes reported, two Miami class action plaintiff filed a class action lawsuit against Allscripts Healthcare Solutions alleging that alleges Allscripts “misled its physician customers about the quality and functionality of MyWay” electronic health record (EHR) software which was sold to approximately 5,000 physicians across the nation from 2009 until Allscripts withdrew it from the market at the end of 2012. The cost of the software, according to the law firm’s website was “approximately $40,000 per physician to implement.”
Were these issues the result of poor leadership or were they inherent to the EHR system itself? As more and more hospitals and healthcare providers are forced to adopt the new EHR systems, the vendors will be held to a higher standard of accountability, and it is quite likely that more lawsuits such as the one in Montana will emerge.
Big IT vendors like Cerner make hospitals sign their life away when they agree to purchase their software. Generally authored by the vendor, these are difficult contracts to break and contain clauses to mitigate “consequential damages.” In other words, the damages hospitals can demand are limited to the cost of the product, although a hospital’s total losses from defective technology are much broader – training costs, de-installation, and system conversion costs, to name a few. These contracts have historically been a safety net for vendors, protecting them from virtually all litigious action.
That trend may be coming to an end as legislative changes shift the landscape of the EHR market. A new era may be on the horizon, one in which hospitals act as more demanding consumers of health IT products and take action when those products don’t fulfill their needs.