The following explorative article makes a useful contribution to our understanding of what those in the research labs have in mind for the Future EHR
http://www.govhealthit.com/article103627-09-10-07-Print
The ultimate health care record
Mayo Clinic researchers are working on ways to make electronic health care records more intelligent. But can they get too smart for everyday providers?
Most medical providers understand that electronic health records have the potential to greatly improve the quality of health care. But it’s not always easy to translate that understanding into adoption.
EHRs are expensive and often complex to deploy. Furthermore, many physicians fear EHRs could impinge on the already limited amount of time they have to spend with patients.
But that doesn’t have to be the case, said Dr. Peter Elkin, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic. He and his colleagues have proposed what they call an intelligent EHR as a way of squeezing all kinds of information out of an electronic record without physicians adding any more tasks to their day.
Intelligent EHRs enable a computer-based system to take a text record, structure the information, encode it and present physicians with real-time data, Elkin said.
“Intelligent EHRs are records where the data that’s enclosed is available in its entirety in a knowledge-representation form,” he said. “That means the information becomes [directly] available and usable to a computer so one can repurpose that information for secondary uses such as quality monitoring and research and education.”
Ultimately, that approach will lead to a better understanding of how to treat patients and give patients more control over their EHRs, he said.
Intelligent EHRs could lead the way to what Elkin refers to as minimally invasive informatics. Without requiring disruptive changes in the way physicians manage their practices, such tools maximize the return on investment for health information technology.
…. (Please go to URL to read whole article).
The need to better support clinicians in all they do from data entry to information coding and decision support are all relevant as is the automated conversion to free text to diagnostic codes and SNOMED.
Clearly the better a clinicians system displays and arranges information for easy comprehension and action to better!
Additionally it is only with intelligent automation of coding can the real value of the secondary uses of data be fully exploited.
To see just what is possible with secondary use I strongly recommend a visit to this URL:
http://www.qresearch.org/default.aspx
Here you can find details of how 4 million patients in the UK are contributing their data (totally anonymously) to create a real time data base to investigate everything from flu outbreaks to unexpected drug side effects.
Just fabulous stuff!
David.
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