Seeing the doctor in 2022 is vastly different from the same experience 20 years ago. These days, the doctor is likely to enter the exam room carrying a tablet. They look at digital copies of your records rather than thumbing through a file of papers. It is all pretty sleek and modern. And yet electronic health records (EHRs) are not all they’re cracked up to be. They still haven’t delivered on their promises.
The EHR concept was introduced to American medicine more than a decade ago. At the time, coming up with an EHR mandate for healthcare facilities was a pet project of numerous lawmakers. They managed to get the mandate through. So what happened?
EHRs were supposed to eliminate the communication problems between healthcare providers. They were supposed to streamline access to records to provide a better continuity of care. Yet very little of what was promised has actually come to fruition.
Too Broad a Scope
The EHR concept was good in principle. But in its implementation, technology developers bit off more than they could chew. They tried to implement EHR systems with too broad a scope, wanting to make their platforms all things to all people.
A better approach would have been to take the broader EHR goal and divide it into smaller, bite-sized chunks. Master one task at a time before moving on to the next. But that’s not what happened. Instead, tech companies went all-in on producing the perfect platform that would do everything. It was too big a task.
Too Many Solutions
Along with biting off more than they could chew, tech companies came up with too many solutions. How is that possible in a market-driven economy? When you are looking to tackle something as vast as healthcare record-keeping, there is a lot of room for a lot of players. The more players you have, the more solutions they develop.
According to an article published by the American Journal of Managed Care, the healthcare industry is currently working with some 500 different EHR systems. On any given healthcare network, you can find more than a dozen active systems working independently of one another.
In theory, this should not be a problem. But in order for EHR systems to accomplish their goals, they need to be able to communicate. They do not, and that is one of the problems. It is a problem that will not be solved until there are fewer players trying to gain a proprietary advantage.
The Data Overload Problem
In addition to EHRs that cannot communicate, the entire system is suffering from data overload. The healthcare technology industry decided to adopt the big data model when EHRs were first being developed. That was a mistake.
According to iMedical Data, a company that specializes in compiling qualified, first-party healthcare data sets, the governing principle of big data is to collect as much information as you can without necessarily worrying about how it will be utilized. Data specialists can figure out how to use it later.
Healthcare records tend to be data dense – to the extreme. Furthermore, they tend to contain a lot of data that is not all that useful outside of an individual healthcare provider setting. Yet all that data continues to take up space in EHR systems. It only creates a bottleneck.
EHRs were supposed to streamline healthcare delivery. They have done no such thing. If physicians and nursing staff are to be believed, EHRs have only taken an already difficult situation and made it worse. That was bound to happen when Washington’s mandate came down. That is how these things usually go.
