A recent study by Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University's medical school, found that Electronic Health Records (EHRs) enhance the quality of patient care and physician performance. The team found that those physicians who used commercially available EHRs provided significantly better quality of care than physicians using paper records.
While the findings are significant – this is one of the first studies to find strong evidence to prove a positive association between the use of EHRs and quality of care – they are by no means surprising. Making relevant healthcare information available whenever and wherever it is needed is a clear vehicle for improving the quality of healthcare.
But replacing paper with EHRs is only half the battle. No two systems are exactly alike. EHRs have to be able to talk to one another in order for the benefit to be realised. For clinicians, data-sharing creates opportunities for healthcare institutions to work smarter. Through ‘shared workflows,’ clinicians and administrative staff from many locations can use medical databases and EHRs at the same time and share their workload, thus making better informed decisions and reducing the chances of clinical errors.
For patients, it could mean greater power over their own care. They could have more choice over where they are treated – within their local area, country, or across Europe– or seek a second opinion on a proposed treatment.
Improved efficiency and the better availability of patients’ critical information can provide a significant improvement in patient care. It can also allow patients and providers to communicate regularly and securely, and reduce costs for healthcare providers.
The development of data-sharing technologies has made this promise a reality. The lifelong medical record is the most comprehensive form of EHR with different health IT systems co-operating and talking to one another. This might, for example, include an x-ray from a radiology department at a hospital, a referral letter from a GP and a dental scan from a dentist. Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) sets the standards for managing the sharing of healthcare documents. It is an architectural infrastructure for data-sharing defined by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative, which lets multiple health IT systems share patient information in the form of documents, while the XDS-I integration profile allows the sharing of images and reports.
In a recent survey of 400 healthcare professionals across Europe, over one in five (22%) respondents said “funding for technology” was a key strategy to improve citizens' health. That figure rose to 33% in Spain and 36% in Italy. All the evidence points to a single conclusion - the efficient sharing of EHRs has the potential to revolutionise the quality of healthcare and the way it is delivered.
Read more about trends and issues facing the healthcare industry in Healthcare Vision, a Canon magazine written in co-operation with the Economist Intelligence Unit.
