Next Generation of Interoperability: For the Patients

Technology has transformed how people engage with nearly every industry. Healthcare is no different, and with the rapid development and adoption of mobile technology, it has never been easier for people to manage their health. There has been a growing demand for applications and devices that allows consumers to closely track and manage various aspects of their health. Consumers can track their heart rates, steps taken, calories eaten and burned, weight lost, and medication taken. Access to this kind of information has profoundly changed lives, providing powerful context for people to understand their health and make more informed choices to improve. Even with all of this information at their fingertips, a crucial piece is missing, impeding a true digital health experience for consumers: easily accessible, mobile health records.

The transition to electronic health records, despite its promises, hasn’t made access to medical information any easier for patients. In fact, they have new roadblocks to deal with, making for a frustrating experience that directly opposes what technology has done for daily life. Healthcare technology needs to catch up and serve the entire community, especially patients.

Health records provide the most complete picture of a person’s medical history. This is valuable information for consumers, especially as they have come to expect access to their health data. Ideally, electronic health records would provide the support for easy and intuitive access for patients. The majority of medical practices and hospitals use some kind of electronic health record system, a healthy install base that offers a wealth of opportunity. However, these EHRs lack the mechanisms necessary to engage with patients.

Most patients would have to make a formal request for their records and wait for delivery. Further complications arise when patients have to deal with multiple physicians who use different, and therefore opposing, EHRs. It is worse for emergency room patients, who have to hand-deliver paper copies of discharge documents to their primary care physicians because they can’t be delivered electronically. This deficit in functionality and interoperability does put health records in patient’s hands, but not in the tech-focused way they expect and demand. There is large room for error, with damaged or lost documents. Considering the digital options that should be available, this solution is frankly unacceptable

There are several workaround solutions to the interoperability issue of electronic health records. Their successes, however, range from middling to poor. The U.S. government, responsible for the mad rush to adopt EHRs after they established financial incentives, offers online resources for patients to create their own personal health records (PHR), linking to a variety of applications and services. Patients are tasked with aggregated their health data across multiple sources and then determining what service best fits their needs. The burden is placed on the patient, already struggling with acquiring their data and now needing to upload it to another incompatible system. It was a similar mistake that felled Google’s 2008 entrant into the healthcare industry, the now-defunct Google Health platform.

Microsoft and other companies still offer personal health record repositories, but they still require patients to deliver the health records to them. For consumers used to having data delivered on their personal devices at their convenience, the burden is too great.

There is a demand for health management tools from the public, but electronic health records do not currently serve them. EHRs lack reliable and intuitive digital mechanisms for patients to retrieve their records, forcing them to deal with delivery wait times and paper copies that can be forgotten, damaged, or lost. Workaround solutions, such as Google Health, put the burden on patients to aggregate the data themselves, instead of fetching and organizing it for them. Even with those solutions, patients cannot use them to communicate with their care team if they have questions or concerns about their records. We are living in a digital world that is all about convenience, which is sorely lacking in the healthcare industry. It is time for the industry to be shaken up, and for innovation to disrupt and drive the future of digital health, for the sake of everyone.
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Steve Yaskin is the CEO for Health Gorilla, a leader in digital health. Formerly the Founder of big data analytical companies Queplix and QueWeb, and a Lead Analyst for Pfizer, Warner Lambert, Johnson & Johnson, Independence Blue Cross, among others, Steve is a visionary entrepreneur that has a combined 15+ years of experience in founding and developing successful start-ups in cloud and data management fields.

(Image credit: Pri Med)