Those
of you who have been reading Nexus and attending the annual general
meeting are aware that our organization has taken on the significant
task of getting our members online with an electronic medical record
(EMR) in the next two to five years. This is a large and complex
project that has attracted national attention in a number of forums.
Some of you may be wondering what's happened over the summer and
where we are with the initiative.
As
a review, the idea is to make an EMR available and affordable to the
entire membership of the NLMA. To do this we have partnered with
Unisys, an important IT company. We have discussed at length what
the project has to accomplish, from desktop support to application
development, networking, hardware, training, service, and support.
All of those things fit under the business umbrella of "costs."
Given that, we then had to deal with the issue of how this project
will pay for itself. A number of transaction-based models have been
explored. A transaction is like the fee you pay to the bank when you
use an instant teller or your debit card. Every time you use it, the
bank charges a fee.
The
challenge has been to see if proposed transaction fees would be
sufficient to cover projected costs. This exercise, a business case,
has occupied our time through the early parts of the summer. The
good news is that, even though we have more work to do in this area,
the early numbers seem to indicate that the approach is prudent and
that the transaction method can in fact see returns offset expenses.
In other words, our theory for financing NELL appears sound.
There
is, however, much yet to do. The business case is a high level
document and many of the numbers must be confirmed. The business
case supposes agreements with other agencies and health care
providers. While we have initial support from these groups, support
is not an agreement and formal agreements are necessary; these
agreements must be reached. Finally, we must fashion a framework
agreement with Unisys to allow us to proceed with the planning and
development of NELL, from application development to beta testing to
piloting to full scale rollout.
So,
much has been done and much more needs to be done. J.R.R. Tolkien
had a chapter in Lord of the Rings called "Many Meetings." So it
goes.
Dr.
Gerard Farrell is chair of the NLMA’s EMR Project
Steering Committee. |
