Okay campers, we’re going to jump right in to this one. There was a point not too long ago when the US was involved in the SALT talks, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. For those too young to remember, the US and the Soviets—that’s what we used to call the Russians. Actually, they were called Russians before they got married and changed their name to Soviets which is neither here nor there.

This came about because the two countries were MAD at each other. Not in the usual sense, but in the sense of mutually assured destruction—of the world—several times over. Anyway, it finally occurred to both sides that perhaps we only needed enough weapons to blow up the world a few times instead of hundreds of times. What was the result? We’re still here. We’re here because the people who built the weapons agreed to greatly reduce their number of weapons. They learned how to function differently. Instead of saying we can’t do that, they took the approach of saying, “If we wanted to do that, how would we do it?” Getting rid of nuclear weapons—no small feat.

Segue. I realize this is a bit of a stretch just to make a point, but since we’ve come this far we might as well make it. What would you do if you came to work one day and received an email which read that your organization had decided against ever implementing an EHR?

To me that is a perfectly reasonable idea. Of course, I’m someone who wonders how the color purple feels. But why not stop all of this foolishness around EHR?  Agree, or is killing EHR a foolish idea?

I think it’s much less foolish than implementing an EHR and having no reasonable expectation that it will work.  The odds are that your EHR has a better chance of failing than it has of succeeding.

I have no problem with EHR.  I do, however, have a problem with businesses constantly making the same mistakes, making EHR a multi-million dollar repository for their mistakes, and then complain about the fact that the EHR isn’t doing a good job.

What do you think?