There is a lot being written about electronic health records (EHRs) today, so most Americans would be forgiven if they entered a healthcare facility and expected them to be all-digital. A single doctor’s appointment to the average health office, however, bursts that bubble. While some systems are electronic, many clinics and offices are still relying on paper records. Truth be told, the state of the plan to convert to EHR – a pillar of the Obama administration’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- in the U.S. is in disarray. Critics have called it “a failed promise.”
There are a number of reasons that the present system simply isn’t working, and they include a lack of platform integration between varied systems which is preventing interoperability, resistance to new technology, competing vendors, patient information security concerns, the costs and time it takes for new EHR implementations and user dissatisfaction with the existing digital records systems. To try to solve the problem, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee recently created a bipartisan working group to find ways for Congress and the Obama administration to collaborate and improve the state of EHRs in the U.S., reported the website Health Data Management.
“After $28 billion in taxpayer dollars spent subsidizing electronic health records, doctors don’t like these electronic medical record systems and say they disrupt workflow, interrupt the doctor-patient relationship and haven’t been worth the effort,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate committee, who has been joined in the effort by Ranking Member Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). “The goal of this working group is to identify the five or six things we can do to help make the failed promise of electronic health records something that physicians and providers look forward to instead of something they endure.”
The new working group has an ambitious set of goals: to help doctors and hospitals improve the quality of care and patient safety; to facilitate information exchange between different EHR vendors and different health professionals; to empower patients to engage in their own healthcare through more user-friendly access to their personal health information; to leverage health information technology capabilities to improve patient safety; and to protect patient privacy and security of health information.
The working group says it will try to solve existing problems in two ways: either through administrative fixes or with legislative patches that will come in the form of new bills. To that end, the group says it will invite a number of knowledgeable stakeholders in the process, including health professionals, health IT developers, relevant government agencies, and other experts specializing in health information technology (HIT).