Steve Fox Interviewed on Negotiating EHR Agreements
As if foreshadowing our upcoming webinar on negotiating EHR license agreements in the post-HITECH world, For the Record interviewed our own Steve Fox on this very subject in its February 15, 2010 cover story:
Steve Fox, senior partner and chair of the IT group at the law firm Post & Schell, says such strategies will be critical to an implementation’s ultimate success. For instance, he says vendors’ guarantees that their platform will meet meaningful use thresholds should be discounted.
“I’d be surprised if [satisfying] the final regulations will be achieved by a vendor doing anything,” he says. “Ultimately, it will be up to individual physicians’ offices or provider organization to achieve meaningful use, and in order to do it, they will need that vendor’s help. I have to laugh when I see those guarantees, ‘If you buy our product, you’ll achieve meaningful use,’ because nobody can make that claim. On the other hand, the failure of the vendor’s product can cause you to fail to achieve meaningful use. That’s why it is so important that you have tight provisions in the contract saying that whatever you want that vendor’s product to achieve, it will meet those particular objectives.
“Many vendors use the phrase ‘We don’t know what we don’t know’ as a way to say they can’t try to comply with future regulations, but our position is if you are in the HIT arena, you have to agree up front to comply with whatever they are,” he adds.
You can read the full article here.
"IT Vendor Negotiations in the ARRA Era," For the Record (February 15, 2010).
