EHRs Products Are Still Immature
Many feel that the “electronification” of medical records will lead to significant savings. Nothing can be farther than the truth – the reality is that while Electronic Health Records (EHRs) provide the structure to organize health related information, to make it really count, the practitioner has to adopt it as part of delivering care. There is a significant difference between EHRs and Electronic Medical Records , but for the purposes of this blog, we will use the phrase EHR to simply identify medical data in electronic form.
While EHRs will improve the efficiency of delivering care, they will have minimal impact on the efficacy of care unless they are incorporated into the process of delivering care. It is very clear that delivering better care has an order of magnitude more significant impact on healthcare costs than simply focusing on the administration of healthcare. Studies have shown that of the 2.7 trillion dollars in healthcare expenditure, improving efficiency will impact less than 15% of the costs. The focus of EHRs should be on delivering better care. While the challenges of integrating data across different disciplines and practitioners is really daunting, merely integrating data will not help improve the efficacy of care. Real improvements can only come if practitioners are given easy mechanism to interpret the data. Taking into context that the amount of time spent in interpreting the data is reducing each year, the ability of EHR vendors to facilitate interpretation of data will be crucial to delivering better care.
EHRs vendors today ignore the role of qualitative data (or practitioner’s notes). These notes play a very significant role in improving the quality of care delivered as these notes (along with the other empirical data) show the patients history. Integrating these notes across multiple disciplines and different timelines is extremely challenging. First the notes are unstructured and nearly free-form, and second, the depth and range of issues covered vary from discipline to discipline and from practitioner to practitioner. Despite these difficulties, EHR vendors should provide easy mechanisms to add some degree of structure to these notes and provide simple tools to collaborate across multiple disciplines. Semantic and fuzzy logic systems may lend some degree of relevance to this area, but much needs to be researched in this place. The main point of this blog is that EHRs are a distant ways from becoming a mature technology.
