Today, the United Kingdom's National Health Service is a leader in converting its electronic health records into a usable database for medical research. In Canada, we currently lack this capacity.
Health-care costs are rising faster than the rate of inflation and demographic shifts in Atlantic Canada will push these costs even higher in coming years and expectations concerning health care outcomes reflect expensive technological and pharmaceutical advances.
Governments are being pressed to find cost management solutions that do not contribute to increases in clinical risk. Chief among these are initiatives promoting health informatics research, developing workable eHealth solutions and consolidating health data systems.
We need to integrate health informatics into our overall commitment to improving health care and invest in the technology and organization that will provide the platform for health informatics management.
With the relentlessly increasing sophistication of technology, the amount of health data available to medical researchers is slated to increase substantially. Historically, medical researchers had only limited, paper-based data points on which to base their experiments, but future researchers will have available enormous online databases containing terabytes of data for their analysis.
Medical researchers will be able to use comprehensive health networks to determine the effectiveness of a specific treatment or to discover the harmful side-effects of a drug. While some of this research will occur in the private sector, public investment in this area will be critical.
Advanced medical informatics research will not only require a comprehensive technical infrastructure, it will also require a talented pool of researchers trained in medical informatics and related fields, working collaboratively with the private sector.
Clearly, the provincial governments and universities are key players, but the federal government also is of critical importance.
The Medical Research Council's mandate underscores the importance of the funding of workforce training and fellowships to expand the population of trained researchers in biomedical informatics, bioinformatics and computational biology.
In Atlantic Canada, we are uniquely positioned to benefit from advancements in health informatics research. But there are challenges associated with converting existing or future provincial electronic health records into a usable pan-Atlantic database for medical research. These challenges are unsurprising given the decentralized approach of the current efforts to increase adoption of electronic health record systems in Canada.
Challenges also exist with data sharing. A future health informatics research community will need to develop technical infrastructure and data standards to improve data sharing among existing systems. Safeguards must be put in place to protect patient privacy but protection must be balanced against the potential benefits from research.
We should also form a comprehensive review of these data-sharing challenges including the current legal framework for sharing research data.
Strong medical research communities will be the backbone of the future of effective health care. In Atlantic Canada, we have an opportunity to develop a regional data sharing infrastructure to support the development of world-class health informatics research, rather than to create isolated, province-specific research databases or waiting for a national strategy to drive innovation and competitiveness.
But achieving this vision will require substantial leadership and effort on the part of governments and health communities to overcome the technical and social hurdles ahead.
The goal of these initiatives is to use technology to maximize the effectiveness of the health care system by reducing costs, increasing patient safety and improving quality of care. These initiatives can help to confirm the core principle of evidence-based medicine so that patients and physicians have the best knowledge and information available when making treatment decisions. Policymakers should be focused on these challenges now.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Peter Lindfield
Quelle/Source: New Brunswick Business Journal, 09.03.2010
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