Providers and policymakers working hard to transition the healthcare sector to EHRs might not want to think about this, but at least one longtime observer of HIT is suggesting that EHRs have already had their day and it’s time to move on to something new.

 After a brief overview of the development and introduction of electronic health records, he turns the corner and declares, “It’s time to forget and rethink the model.”

It’s not that he thinks EHRs don’t provide significant value; it’s that “new approaches” to healthcare delivery, such as patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) and accountable care organizations (ACOs), “require a different toolset than traditionally has been available to the healthcare market. EHRs, while evidence of technological progress in the industry, were designed to support a provider- and hospital-centric approach to care. As such, they are not fully equipped to catapult the industry towards the collaborative strategy preferred today. ACOs, PMHCs and other approaches will rely upon a platform that facilitates collaboration beyond the enterprise and across the community to achieve multidisciplinary care coordination.”

In his eyes, for these new collaborative models to take hold, “Information Systems will require new technology solutions to flourish.”

The piece is worth reading in its entirety, and we have a sneaking suspicion that some readers might not see the situation as quite so cut-and-dried. But, for our purposes, the argument raises an interesting question. Specifically, in an environment that is clearly ever-changing, what’s the proper and most effective role for policymakers?

After all, as, say, the Meaningful Use discussion highlights, it takes a lot of time and effort to get policies in place that have a chance of effectively moving stakeholders from Point A to Point B. But what’s a policymaker to do when it becomes clear that many in the sector have already started thinking about jumping to Points C, D, and E?

Jeff Rowe blogs daily at HITECHWatch.