Reporter's Notebook: TEPR 2005
By Neil Versel, contributing editorMost of the usual suspects were there, as was the dog-and-pony show often referred to as a vendor exhibition, but something was different about the 21st annual edition of TEPR, which was held last week in Salt Lake City.
As is the case across the health-IT industry, a lot of the hype of past years has disappeared, as executives, techies, clinicians, consultants, and vendors alike are coming to understand that adopting clinical information technology is a difficult task. That made for a rather low-key event with more realistic expectations.
For example, Cingular Wireless representatives reported that they are seeing only a "moderate" rate of adoption of electronic prescribing technology. Even the value of regional health information organizations (RHIOs) was questioned.
Indeed, TEPR, which stands for Toward an Electronic Patient Record, has entered its third decade, but the health-IT industry still is pursuing the namesake goal.
Attendance at last week's event was just under 3,500 registrants, down from about 4,000 a year ago, though the number of exhibitors and educational sessions increased.
Last year's TEPR in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, marked the first public appearance of David Brailer, M.D., after President Bush named him national coordinator for health-IT. Legendary patient safety guru Lawrence Weed, M.D., the inventor of the SOAP format of clinical notes, also spoke at last year's TEPR conference.
This time around, Brailer had to cancel his planned speech because he was called into a meeting at the White House last Tuesday. Though his staffers would not comment, sources said that the meeting was related to the Bush administration's 2006 budget request of $125 million for the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONCHIT).
As has been widely reported, Congress cut a proposed $50-million appropriation for ONCHIT from the 2005 federal budget.
A few vendors tried to create their own hype, notably Bond Technologies of Tampa, Florida. The little-known ambulatory electronic medical records vendor attempted to make a splash by purchasing the back page of the TEPR program and by having a rather large booth in the exhibit hall. Meanwhile, some of the big EMR players, including Epic Systems (Madison, Wisconsin) and IDX Systems (Burlington, Vermont), did not even have a booth.
Emblematic of the emphasis on substance over style was Chicago-based Allscripts Healthcare Solutions is publishing a book entitled The Electronic Physician: Guidelines for Implementing a Paperless Practice. Allscripts' vice president for product management, Stuart Scholly, called it a compendium of best practices for EMR implementation.
Allscripts itself, and not any specific individual, gets the author credit. Scholly said that the book does not even mention the company after the first chapter so as not to have others take it as a sales tool.
