U.S. healthcare providers hesitant about "offshoring" EHRs to India
Will American healthcare providers, like major companies in other sectors of the economy, outsource their electronic medical records systems and maintenance offshore, especially to an established tech industry in India? According to the Wall Street Journal, Indian technology vendors face a significant amount of skepticism regarding outsourcing health IT to India.
While major tech companies routinely utilize data centers, service desk and other products and services in India, healthcare providers are not used to such outsourcing arrangements. Indian IT companies like HCL, InfoSys, and Wipro are trying to tap into the booming health IT market in the United States. However, they face a number of important challenges, including concerns over privacy, security and integrity of protected data, breadth of experience in the industry,and ease of implementation of such systems. One prominent CIO described this challenge succinctly in the Journal:
Designing and installing new medical systems 'is hard to do off site, let alone offshore,' says Darren Dworkin, chief information officer of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Cedars-Sinai is close to finishing a four-year, $100-million project to install an electronic medical-records system. Mr. Dworkin says that 80% to 90% of the work isn't the sort of commodity coding that is easily outsourced, instead requiring an intimate knowledge of the hospital's terminology and how its doctors and nurses work.
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"Qualms Arise Over Outsourcing Of Electronic Medical Records," Wall Street Journal (November 2, 2010).
