John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Posts Tagged ‘EHR’
PHRs, EHRs and Social Media – Where are We Headed?
February 2, 2010
Two coincidental articles were published today. First, in iHealthBeat, John Moore and Matthew Holt talk about why ”Consumers Not Ready for Do-It-Yourself PHRs.” In response to the decision by Revolution Health to discontinue their PHR, the experts comment that “the direct-to-consumer market for PHRs just doesn’t work.” But they say that populated records are the future, those tethered to EHRs, like Kaiser’s and how Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault enable this kind of population of data from other sources. In the future, as it is now for some, the PHR will not be separate from the EHR, just the interface on the front of patient data. But this will mean patient entered data, like diaries of their conditions, and from home monitoring devices.
The second article appeared in JAMA, from the Centre for eHealth Innovation in Toronto, titled, “Electronic Health Records in the Age of Social Networks and Global Telecommunications.” Here the authors talk about the intersection of social media and EHRs. Specifically, the authors envision the future with open standards which can enhance interoperability and “natural language enrich by audio or video…Rich media has the potential to reduce ambiguity and enhance performance in complex tasks.”
So while the concept of PHRs may be on the decline, the future of patient empowerment through information has only begun. The convergence of personal health information, provider-based information and social and rich media will provide a basis for future health decisions on a very individual, personal level.
Intelligent EHRs – What are they?
September 12, 2007
In an article on Government Health IT, the Intelligent EHR is discussed by a Mayo Clinic physician. Is is something more that an EHR with decision support tools? One quote says, “information becomes [directly] available and usable to a computer so one can repurpose that information for secondary uses such as quality monitoring and research and education.” The article also cites this as “minimally invasive informatics” which avoids disruptive changes in medical practice. But what does it really look like?
Is it simply decision support like alerts? This can result in alert fatigue. It may include quality monitoring, research, pay for performance, biosurveillance – all items which add value to the EMR. Yet there are “some barriers, particularly the increasingly complex ethical, political, technical and social issues surrounding secondary uses of personal information.”
Maybe the real future of an intelligent EHR with be something similar to the sematic web – intelligent agents bringing just the right amount of information to the point of care.
EHRs Fix Everything?
May 12, 2007
The Healthcare IT Guy pointed to this very interesting article from Family Practice Management, EHRs Fix Everything and Nine Other Myths. Points like, software needs to work the way we work and software will eliminate errors question typical selling points for EHRs. It is well known that making absolute statements or even inflated statements about software is par for the course but rarely proven out. For instance, software can cause other unintended consequences and reduce efficiency. However, planning, training and implementation can make significant strides toward reducing these problems and more closely approach the hoped for outcomes of EHRs. Everyone in healthcare IT should read this article just to keep us humble about what we can accomplish.
Americans Positive about EHRs/PHRs – Markle Survey
December 7, 2006
In a new survey released today by the Markle Foundation, reports that the “Survey shows that consumers view personal health records as an important element in reducing medical errors and increasing quality of care.” Yet 80% were concerned about privacy and the possible use of information by marketers. 75% see a role for government in protecting their privacy. The report on the survey will be presented at the Connecting Americans to Their Health Care conference in Washington, D.C. The conference includes a keynote address by Adam Bosworth of Google.
