The Strategy That Will Fix Healthcare, the title of a Webinar through the Harvard Business Review, brought up interesting points on the future of healthcare, including those regarding electronic health records (EHR).
All healthcare providers are moving to EHRs to stay compliant with federal laws, but there are a number of hiccups involved in the process. There have actually been many technology improvements over the last few years that make storing data and accessing that data more convenient, but healthcare experts agree that there are some improvements needed.
First off, not every EHR system uses the same data definitions, which can be a problem when it comes to communicating between systems. Second, as the researchers pointed out in their
webinar, all types of data, from doctors’ notes to radiological images, should be combined for each patient in EHR systems, which includes picture archiving and communication systems (PACs).
Another issue brought to light is that data is included in the full care cycle, which includes the data generated by a referring doctor or specialist. How can this data be entered into a system and still be used efficiently and effectively by other caregivers?
What’s needed, the researchers point out, is an architecture that allows “easy extraction of outcome measures, process measures, and activity-based cost measures for each patient and medical condition.” Open architecture systems allow this goal to be met. Vendor neutral archiving systems are also allowing healthcare professionals a level of accessibility that “all-inclusive” PACs and EHR systems can’t offer.
Interoperability is important if patients are going to receive the best quality of care possible. The days of a patient going to one doctor for a medical issue are dwindling. Specialists get involved, doctors share patient data to get opinions, and all this needs a system that allows the information to flow
smoothly from one entity to the next. Not all PACs and EHR systems can offer this.
Sharing medical images involves much inefficiency. Many medical images get lost between doctors and specialists, which means the patient has to reschedule appointments with the radiologist. This slows down treatment and the rate of the patient’s recovery.
There is a solution to this aspect of healthcare services and it’s called Virtual CD. Many healthcare facilities invested in costly CD burning technology. The equipment was proprietary, took up lots of room and required too many staff hours to manage. Technologists spent a lot of time burning
medical images to CDs and filing them in the right place. Sometimes, the CDs would not burn correctly, and nobody would know until that CD needed to be accessed.
The CDs, which were more convenient than film, still took up lots of room in the radiologists’ offices. They were also fairly easy to steal. But with Virtual CD, which is what OffSite Image Management, Inc.,
offers its clients, everything is accessible in the cloud. No expensive equipment is required. Nobody needs to worry about a CD burning improperly. A simple two-step process is all that’s needed to safely store images, which can be accessed at any time.