Three medical systems in Texas alone have spent $110 million on electronic health records, reports the Houston Business Journal in an article that documents the progress of several large hospital systems in adopting EHRs. Texas Children’s Hospital will spend $60 million over five years to switch over from paper records to electronic ones, a transition that “will result in cultural and organizational process changes,” David Finn, Texas Children’s vice president, told the Journal. “We’re considering this a capital project that is really part of an expansion of our healthcare services,” he said. M.D. Anderson Cancer Center couldn’t find an EHR system that would support both research and clinical applications, so it built its own. “Other people have tried to develop their own in-house system, but the labor was so horrendous, most gave up,” said Lynn Vogel, M.D. Anderson’s chief information officer. The Methodist Hospital is spending $43 million over eight years and is rolling out the system all at once instead of department by department, as many other hospitals have done. Many of the 4,000 Methodist staff who have already been trained in the new EHR report that the conversion is overwhelming. And Baylor College of Medicine has spent $10 million so far to make EHRs operational in all internal medicine departments. Within the next year, all Baylor clinics plan to use EHRs.
