SaaS

CMIO: “In the past, major barriers to EHR adoption included high upfront costs and lack of IT resources to implement and maintain the technology,” the report stated. “A SaaS model solves both of these issues and Ovum believes it is the best approach for physician offices and small hospitals. With a predictable, monthly expense, a subscription-based SaaS EHR is a much easier cost for providers to swallow." Speech recognition tools have helped increase EHR adoption among clinicians by increasing the accuracy of the patient health record—providers don’t need to make as many corrections. Speech recognition should feed directly into the PHR without the lag time of transcription, according to the report.” – It makes sense that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and speech recognition could be used to increase EHR adoption rates. Together they offer several potential benefits as well as creating a better user experience. In fact, I'm a fan of both and have blogged about how I think they could be used in pharmacy; here and here. However, in regards to speech recognition, an educational session at the 95th Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) reports that “a study by Zoltani and colleagues conducted at their facility found that 68 percent of more than 17,000 finalized reports contained errors, 15 percent of which could potentially change the meaning of the report. A radiologist's experience, sex and caseload were not associated with significant differences in error rates.”

Software as a service (SaaS) has recently been popping up in healthcare related news, from Fujitsu's SaaS solution for drug trials to the host of web-based applications from Pharmacy OnceSource.

SaaS is different than the traditional enterprise software model because the provider of the software licenses it to the customer as an on-demand service. The vendor often times hosts the software on their own servers where data is manipulated and returned to the customer for viewing. It's kind of like renting software.

The beauty of SaaS applications like those from Pharmacy OneSource are that they can be viewed from any device with a web-enabled browser; Mac, PC, smartphone, etc. In addition, the application is owned, delivered, maintained and managed by the provider, limiting the burden on the customer. A by-product of this model is that delivery of the application over the web ensures that the software is always up to date.

The SaaS model appears to be popular in the “business” world at present, but is increasing in popularity in healthcare secondary to its simplified deployment and reduced cost. With advances in cloud computing strategy, better data storage models and faster internet connections I think it's only a matter of time before we start to see more SaaS solutions in pharmacy practice. And why shouldn't we? By their very nature SaaS applications lend themselves to use on mobile devices like the tablet PC and iPad, which in turn offers greater flexibility for pharmacists practicing at the bedside. Just a thought.