EMRs and Systems Integration

The healthcare industry is commonly known to be far behind other industries in terms of technology adoption. So I find it quite interesting that despite this lag, I think that healthcare will lead the way into the future with respect to systems integration.

I have been working with healthcare entities on implementing practice management software (PM) and electronic medical records (EMR) for the past 6 years. At present, I work as a Systems Application Analyst (whatever that means) at Piedmont Medical Care Corporation. Basically, the IS department supports the network of physicians - primary care, specialty, surgical and hospitals, etc. - that are employed by Piedmont Healthcare. In studying the literature on the success (or, more often, failure) of EMR implementations, what Piedmont has been able to accomplish is quite impressive with nearly all primary care physicians using EMR for their everyday charting.

Beyond simply entering chart notes into a computer, going digital comes with the hope of:

1. Providing a single point of access for reviewing past medical records
2. Communicating test results to patients, hospitals (when needed) and other healthcare professionals
3. Interfacing with lab and diagnostic systems so that orders are sent electronically and results received digitally as well
4. Integration of drug databases that allow for drug-drug, drug-allergy and drug-condition checking to improve patient safety
5. Incorporation of ICD-9 (and soon, ICD-10) codes
6. Offering web portals for patients to access anytime / anywhere to view their medical history including labs, diagnostic reports and have secure communications with their providers
7. Digital faxing to reduce the cost of traditional paper faxing
8. Access to drug formularies at the point of care delivery to help ensure that medications prescribed are on the insurance formulary
9. The ability to easily exchange information between 1 system and another.

Piedmont has most of the above fully implemented and is working on even more functionality greater than this.

My future blogs will cover this topic in more detail.