It’s a huge pain trying to transfer health information, between patients, doctors, different clinics, hospitals, etc. If you try and move far enough, your records might get transferred as a bunch of PDFs or scanned images on a CD.
There is no good standard that ticks all the boxes, so it’s not just a matter of getting everyone to agree. A solid standard that addresses all the needs would be amazing, and it would help improve healthcare so much.
People would get control over their own health information (as much as appropriate without causing unnecessary harm), and we could properly use health tracking data from biometrics devices for personalized care. We could do large scale studies using properly anonymized data, and we wouldn’t have proprietary systems to try and work around.
Best of all, you could go to a new clinic/hospital/ER and you wouldn’t need to enter the same information all over again (likely missing clinically relevant data along the way).
I should have worded it differently, it’s possible there is a best standard that I don’t know enough about. I don’t know enough about OpenEHR, but that’s something I’ll read more about :)
I completely agree. All the different EMR systems make doing any research just that more tedious. And like you said it’d be so nice to just walk into a health care facility and not worry about paperwork
Some EHRs are pretty good about this nowadays. Epic, for example, allows you to share info across health systems. The user has to enable it though, which is a problem due to low adoption among older patients.
Also, this will be less of a problem in coming years due to increasing consolidation of health systems.
I can’t speak to much of this, but I have a friend who works on the technical side of health insurance. Specifically he is helping with FHIR. I did some HL7 work a long time ago which lets health systems talk to each other. FHIR is supposed to be a more comprehensive offshoot (I asked if it was HL7 on steroids and wasn’t corrected).
Unfortunately, I may have misunderstood. My career took me a different path than his so I’m way out of date on it.
Here’s a more technical one: health information
It’s a huge pain trying to transfer health information, between patients, doctors, different clinics, hospitals, etc. If you try and move far enough, your records might get transferred as a bunch of PDFs or scanned images on a CD.
There is no good standard that ticks all the boxes, so it’s not just a matter of getting everyone to agree. A solid standard that addresses all the needs would be amazing, and it would help improve healthcare so much.
People would get control over their own health information (as much as appropriate without causing unnecessary harm), and we could properly use health tracking data from biometrics devices for personalized care. We could do large scale studies using properly anonymized data, and we wouldn’t have proprietary systems to try and work around.
Best of all, you could go to a new clinic/hospital/ER and you wouldn’t need to enter the same information all over again (likely missing clinically relevant data along the way).
Have you tried the OpenEHR standard? What’s wrong with it?
I should have worded it differently, it’s possible there is a best standard that I don’t know enough about. I don’t know enough about OpenEHR, but that’s something I’ll read more about :)
I completely agree. All the different EMR systems make doing any research just that more tedious. And like you said it’d be so nice to just walk into a health care facility and not worry about paperwork
FHIR is an excellent standard.
Some EHRs are pretty good about this nowadays. Epic, for example, allows you to share info across health systems. The user has to enable it though, which is a problem due to low adoption among older patients.
Also, this will be less of a problem in coming years due to increasing consolidation of health systems.
I can’t speak to much of this, but I have a friend who works on the technical side of health insurance. Specifically he is helping with FHIR. I did some HL7 work a long time ago which lets health systems talk to each other. FHIR is supposed to be a more comprehensive offshoot (I asked if it was HL7 on steroids and wasn’t corrected).
Unfortunately, I may have misunderstood. My career took me a different path than his so I’m way out of date on it.