Electronic medical record keeping has been around for some time, but it is uncommon to find the information shared widely. Typically, individual hospitals are linked only to affiliated local doctor’s offices and service providers. The April’s announcements show increasing willingness of governments and larger institutions to tackle the technical and financial challenges of introducing electronic data sharing on a large scale.
In April Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper reported that British Columbia is about to hit the big league in health-care electronic record-keeping, an area often cited by experts as a key to resolving many of the country’s medicare woes. The province has contracted with Sun Microsystems (BC) Inc. and other partners to establish the system on a province-wide scale. The project, funded largely by the federal government agency Canada Health Infoway, is the largest of its kind to be launched in Canada, and one of the largest e-health ventures in North America.
Despite billions of new dollars spent every year on Canada's public health-care system, according to the newspaper, record-keeping has remained largely rooted in the technological stoneage. A majority of doctors still rely on handwritten patient files, while health-care institutions are rarely capable of communicating patient data with each other by computer. The province’s system is designed so that, eventually, every health-care provider in the province will have electronic access to lab-test results, diagnostic imaging and medical records of individual patients.
Richard Alvarez, president and CEO of Canada Health Infoway, told the newspaper that at present there are too many silos, with information locked away in hospitals and doctors' offices. Storing lab tests electronically is also expected to cut the number of unnecessary tests. The newspaper notes that studies show up to 15 percent of diagnostic tests get lost or are ordered by clinicians unaware their patient has had the same tests done previously. “From a diagnostic point of view, it's tremendous, being able to get together lab results and medication history to provide a faster, more accurate diagnosis," Dr. Alvarez said. Advocates of centralized, electronic record-keeping also believe the new system will result in fewer medical errors.
If the Australian government takes the advice from the expert authors of a recent report, health providers throughout the country could soon be sharing patient data electronically. According to an Australian Associated Press (AAP) article featured on the Nine News Network, a report commissioned by the Australian Centre for Health Research argues a broadband network of health services should be created to allow patients to be tracked no matter where they go for medical services.
Monash University e-health research unit director Michael Georgeff told the news service that about one-quarter of all Australians suffered from a chronic illness and many had complex health needs. "Chronic illness requires close monitoring and, often, intensive management by a team of health professionals," Professor Georgeff said. “Because of the way our health system currently operates, one doctor will often not know what tests or medications have been prescribed by another doctor, even when they are members of the same team."
He estimates between 30 and 50 percent of chronically ill patients were hospitalised because of inadequate management of their condition. "Nearly every (chronically ill patient) would be better off if the medical practitioners who care for and treat them were more in touch with each other," Prof Georgeff said in his paper E-Health and the Transformation of Health Care. He noted that other important communications, such as referrals and hospital discharge summaries, were still not being handled electronically.
For changes to occur, he said, the government should provide incentives for individual health services to share their information.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Jennifer Anderson
Quelle/Source: Ergoweb, 20.04.2007
