Hospital to Turn Off EHR Access for Doctors Who Haven’t Finished ICD-10 Training


This article is pretty shocking. I can imagine how well this would go over at most hospitals. I hope we get to hear how well this strategy works and who will win what appears like a game of chicken between the doctors and hospital. Does the hospital need the doctors more or do the doctors need the hospital more?

Here’s an excerpt from the article linked above that describes what they’re doing:

“There is a ‘go live’ date for these changes that is Oct. 1 for everyone across the country, including us, so we felt it was very important that all medical providers be trained,” Groves said. “We set a date of July 27, which is Monday — if they have not done the training by then, their access to Soarian will be cut off.”

If they don’t have access to the EHR, that’s basically saying that a doctor can’t practice at that hospital, no? It’s interesting that access to the EHR is being used as essentially revoking privileges to be a doctor at a hospital. I can hear many doctors initial reaction being that they didn’t want to access the EHR anyway. Although, it’s a lot more complex than that response would describe. Can you practice medicine at a hospital that has an EHR without having access to the EHR? I believe the answer is no unless the hospital makes some extraordinary concessions to a doctor (not likely to happen in the hospital mentioned above).

What do you think about using EHR access as a way to motivate doctors to do something? Is that a good strategy? Will we see it happen more?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • One would hope that the hospital made the effort to have training easily available, made sure doctors knew long ahead, and then actually enforced this rule with everything it implies.

    Ron

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