Q: What is a Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR).
A: It is an individuals medical records in an electronic format.
Q: What benefits are there to using EHR’s.
A: They are believed to reduce costs, promote standardization of care, and reduce errors. It may also allow research to be done faster because the digitized data is easier to work with and their would be more of it. It will also improve individuals access to their medical records, hopefully make billing more accurate, and reduce duplicate services.
Q Are there challenges or risks to using EHR’s.
A: Legal liability in technology used in health care is a risk to the company using the EHR. Another challenge that needs resolved is control of records, as in who has control, the hospital, the physician, the patient, and also how these records are maintained if say a physician retires. We need to be able to mark the documents as official and unaltered, this can be done with the use of digital signatures but is a challenge to maintain for a large organization. Another challenge is that each organization will use the records differently and want to display them differently so at least the display of data must be customizable even if the data is stored the same way across different organizations. The only increased risk to the individual is that their information may be stolen from the companies database and used for identity theft, although this is not any higher than banks or other companies who have your data, and similar data protection requirements could be put in place.
Q: Are EHR’s really used in the health industry today.
A: In the United States the probably the successful use of EHR is the Department of Veteran Affairs has a enterprise wide implementation the call the ‘Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture’ or VistA. A study a few years ago showed that less then 10%, (Wikipedia footnote 3), of health care providers in the US had fully integrated solutions, meaning that it was being used in most aspects of the hospital, not just a small section like billing. Some of the biggest challenges to migrating are physician and nurse adoption, basically if the people who will enter data and uses the system the most don’t like to use it then it won’t get used and the system will fail. The other largest challenge being cost to implement a EHR system.
Q: Are there consumer accessible EHR’s available.
A: Google is building Google Health and Microsoft is building Health Vault both of which are in beta (testing) stages but they have made them available for you to use and you can enter your data, and you can check if they can accept your providers data, they can accept data from a variety of sources and you may be able to have you pharmacy or health care provider enter data for you automatically and not just yourself. Also a few organization have their own implementation, for example IHC has myHealth which you can get access to, you can see more information about this in an earlier post.
Q: If I use one of these EHR’s is my health organization going to be able to use it.
A: The short answer is currently probably not, ask your provider or check there website to find out. There is a large governmental push in the United States to convert health providers to EHR’s and also legislation attempting to force them to make the data interoperable so that it should be able to be moved easily. So I imagine within the next ten years (hopefully a lot less) most organizations will have a form of EHR that you will probably be able to access.
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