Electronic Health Records: Improvement or Headache?

  Problem When a patient needs to switch doctors or hospitals, their electronic health records have to go with them. These documents come to the doctor usually in the form of a PDF. This PDF contains all the information on a patient, which is usually around 30 pages for an adult, but can easily balloon into 50-60 pages. Many pages are a waste, as they provide regulatory and billing information, instead of information regarding the patient’s health. This wastes time for doctors, who just have to sift through dozens of pages of useless information, and then input it into their own system. This problem is compounded by both doctors and patients, who would prefer that this information was more readily accessible in the system so that the doctor can spend more time focusing on patient care, instead of on data entry. Secondly, studies show that since electronic health records became extremely common, the number of malpractice claims skyrocketed. From 2007 to 2010, the numb

Epic, Cerner, CVS align with Surescripts to make personalized prescription benefit, pricing info available in EHRs Six different EHR vendors have revealed a collaborative project to show more data about prescription benefits / pricing at the point of care. This directly relates to my semester project on how to improve electronic health records, as it shows that collaboration is hugely possible. The companies say the new changes will be implemented as soon as next year, which in the healthcare field is extremely quick for new changes. The trial run for this system has been ongoing throughout 2017, and saw use in 3.75 million transactions.