EHR Connectivity Concerns
Healthcare Information Technology is the backbone of the industry, with EHR adoption allowing both patients and providers to glean meaningful information from medical records more easily. While there have certainly been massive benefits to this, there are still hurdles regarding how well these systems are able to talk to each other.
A recent survey showed that ninety percent of healthcare professionals are confused about what makes a highly interoperable EHR. Certainly, if someone is travelling out of state or abroad, they would be concerned about the interoperability of their medical records with whichever new hospital may be nearby. Even at home, though, the closest hospital may not be your regular one and records access makes a big difference in ensuring you get the best care possible.
While EHR’s have been making strides, regional HIT systems remain largely siloed. The same survey mentioned above noted that only 7% of respondents believe their regional system has meaningful connectivity with providers.
Interoperability is the key not just to successful individual patient results, but also to larger scale global epidemics and health crises. Increased connectivity through APIs or other integrations will allow us to not only respond to these types of situations more effectively and with more data, but will also allow for more meaningful research conclusions to be drawn from an increasingly interconnected set of data.
At Extract, we pride ourselves on being able to work with whatever document management system or EHR you’re using. When we retrieve data from unstructured files, we can use HL7, xml, flatfile, or any other type of document you need, and we’ve successfully integrated with every DMS that our clients have put in front of us.
It’s extremely important for systems to be able to communicate with each other, so we work to make sure that our system works with yours, regardless of what you’re using.
If you’d like to learn a bit more about how we do this, send us an email or give us a call, and we’d be happy to show you.
