What I think TFA is trying to express is NOT limited to ICD. That's a "low hanging fruit" which doesn't include the other coding enhancements required for EHR conformance. ICD is a way of expressing complains and maladies via a coded system so that everyone can understand it if it appears as a part of your public medical record. In other words, everyone has to say code xxxx1 = "breast cancer" so that when you show up in an ER 6 months after a diagnosis, they can tell what's going on. The elephant in the room isn't the malady descriptions, its the coding of procedural treatment (SNOMED-CT), laboratory procedures (LOINC), RX allocations (RXNORM and the NDF), and how its billed back to insurance (CPT), and more importantly how they interconnect.
We make EMR systems targeted towards radiology, and I can say with conviction that the whole CCHIT process has thrown GE and Siemens (and their ilk) into absolute chaos. They are, today, faced with fixing their old systems to be modern/conformant, and then trying to keep them updated going forward on a MUCH more aggressive maintenance schedule than they are used to. Oh, and every month that they can't do it, their customers will see as lost revenue from govt. reimbursements. Unenviable is an understatement, it will be a financial disaster for GE if they start losing people en masse to Epic and other new players.
As someone who makes "meaningful use" based systems, I can tell you its no joke to implement. CCHIT certification alone encompasses 25k pages of standards that have to be followed to the letter and proven via testing for qualification.
In a way, it's a strange twist that the big players (GE/Siemens/Merge) lobbied to make the qualifications as hard as they currently are in order to limit new competition, and are now sinking into the pit they themselves dug. Sick, but hilarious simultaneously.
Trolling, LOL.
Every computer made has more than a TB, including the new windows tablets (which we happen to have prototypes of, since we are a development shop). And I deal with big data every day (medical images, among other things). So just to recap, I'm sitting in front of a windows tablet with a 1.5TB drive in it right now.
Oh, and it has audio in, not to mention my mixer has wireless support (granted, most people would plug their tables into a sound card, but that's not the point here).
So, again, Apple is selling last year as new, except they get to control its use?
Again, how about no.
Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss put in an honest day's work.