The need for Electronic Health Record (EHR) begins with an account of the cause of patient deaths in 1999, and the systems credited with - or blamed for (depending on your point of view) - the 98,000 deaths that occur in hospitals in the US each year because of medical errors. Early efforts with EHR aimed to fill the gaps left behind by legacy systems. Looking forward, as the specter of losing patients to errors diminishes, and public opinion on digitization of health information settles, EHR and ondemand information models would undoubtedly play an important role in shaping health outcomes for many.
Consider, patients need for best care and advice from medical experts around the world, and Physicians who want the best tools to deliver it. With the choices available today, there is no straight line to deliver such vision. It would cost system providers a lot more to build advanced capabilities to assemble and assimilate patient health information from various sources of care, and to meet clinicians’ demand of an instantaneous access whenever a patient walks-in to the clinic.
Most patients also want simple and straightforward access, but are not interested in or equipped to understand the technical distinctions involved in health data interoperability, regulated access environments, or technology components required to securing personal information assets inside data vaults or transient on the Internet. The needs are really very simple in the words of Rhona MacDonald.
"I don't want much - just for my medical records to be seen only by those whom I authorize, and for the record to be readily accessible . . . . . I would like a bigger say in what goes into my notes, and if I don't like something I would like it taken out." [1]
This small demand by consumers however, would require enormous changes in system architectures across a very large solution set. Proprietary solutions, complex integrations, and cost are the main impediments to an effective means of attaining success with existing solutions. It isn't surprising to find Physicians in America and worldwide continue to deliver care on paper, or with electronic templates created in Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF documents, and based on their own recollection of a patient's precarious health history on visits to their clinics.
Up to this point, an EHR with open standards and low cost was just a futurist wish list, and advanced solutions to help patients proactively manage their health, yet another pipe dream. If there is a special EHR that could be available for Free, 100% available globally, deliver seamless integrations, and on a highly secure HIPAA compliant platform, one might begin to wonder if it is the same paradigm or really a transformation of some type beginning to gain ground among Physicians and Patients.
Although a forecast of an EHR for Americans within Ten Years was made by Marc Wine at a conference in 2005 [2], the needs of patients and care providers has grown beyond the basic infrastructure.
ONDEMANDHEALTHCARE.net provides one such model for Physicians today delivering autonomy, privacy, and data confidentiality while providing an opportunity to evaluate best uses of health care resources, and improve delivery of all levels of care. Physicians can finally focus on efforts to reduce disease, improve safety, or deliver needed care at a higher level of efficiency, eliminating levels of caregiver inconsistency, and improve quality of care significantly. With SaaS platform that insulates costs for them, solutions built around standards and flows of care, Physicians are able to adhere better to medical standards, and get smarter on areas that need to be improved.
On another front, proactive health care management until this point was considered not possible. With ONDEMANDHEALTHCARE.net Physicians would collaborate to invent approaches that prevents disease or avoid health problems as we age. Patients not only get to know what optimal treatments and medications are being delivered, but also the kinds of solutions that will measurably reduce the rate of health complications. Such proactive systems of care will help patients to get a jump-start on avoiding various kinds of crisis or health-system problems. The solution is built to further help improve ground-level delivery of care for the people who have common and chronic diseases of everyday life.
By improving care for those diseases in systematic ways, Physicians on ONDEMANDHEALTHCARE.net are able to hold costs down and leverage the savings to do more. Ever wonder, what would it look like if an EHR system were to uncover disease patterns at patient visits? We are on the cusp of such an enormous change of a consumer driven care without boundaries.
References:
[1] Macdonald R. Commentary: A patient's viewpoint. BMJ 2001;322(7281):287
[2] Marc Wine, MHA, Program Analyst, Health IT Coordination, GSA, Office of Intergovernmental Solutions, July 19, 2005.
:- SOWSIA Collaborative Group
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