One area of interest for me this semester is the idea of patient transparency in the landscape of Electronic Health Records. EHR is now one of the largest expenditures and initiatives in healthcare across the country, yet many healthcare professionals are disapproving of its implementation, and equally concerning is that patients seldom have direct reliable access to the information being collected.
In an era where people have web based monitoring capabilities of their purchasing, investment, and academic histories, why is healthcare making little advancement in this area? Now that our health history is becoming more web-based, I suspect that consumers will become more demanding of not just interoperability of their records, but more importantly direct access to their medical history through web-based portals, communities etc. Essentially, this solution would look something like an Amazon style UI that is used to track vaccination histories, doctors’ visits, dermatology appointments, and more. Some EHR providers like AllScripts and Epic are beginning to offer similar services with the mobile based platforms of FollowMyHealth and MyChart. I think I could possibly perform an analysis of patients in the local area via survey to measure their interest in such an application and tool, and also research what the biggest hurdles are to adopting such a system or technology.
We will be talking about this topic in more detail, but I like your approach. Interoperability may be moot with cloud-based systems (like Athena). Look specifically at Chapter 10 in the book on Consumer Health Informatics. It has data on patient portals and other platforms. Very helpful start. Go to the resource center for the book for Chapter 10 after you read the chapter. The references at the end of this chapter are linkable as well.
ReplyDeleteCertainly talk to patients, but also consider talking to docs or clinicians how they use it as well. Banner has Cerner, so it may be an option as well. Almost all hospitals have a patient portal. Whether it is usable or not is another question.