Integration of Electronic Health Records into health care systems.

Clinton D Souza

Arizona State University

- Impact Presentation

• Current Health Record systems

• Electronic Health Records (EHR)

• Economic impact

• Environmental impact

• Global impact

• Future work

• Conclusion

OVERVIEW

Current Health Records

• Maintaining health records requires extensive paperwork and

manpower.

• Sharing of data between doctors is a long process.

• Currently paper records represent “massive fragmentation of clinical

health information.”

This causes the cost of information management to increase.

• Transcription of medical records costs around $ 10- 12 billion per year .

http://unosolution.co.in/pdf/Gurley_article.pdf

Electronic Health Records

• HITECH act was enacted under Title XIII of American Recovery and

Reinvestment Act.

• US Department of Health and Human Services is spending $ 25.9

billion to promote the adoption of Health Information Technology.

• Access to data is priority.

• EHR is an evolving concept.

• Provides opportunity to improve quality of care and patient safety.

Economic Impact

• Reduction in spending.

• Increase in revenue.

• Central Utah multi-specialty clinic, increased

revenue - $ 952,200

• Efficient storage of data.

http://www.himss.org/content/files/jhim/18-1/contribution_economic.pdf

Environmental Impact

• Direct reduction in paper use.

• Kaiser Permanete’s EHR systems eliminated:

– 1,000 tons of paper records

– 68 tons of X-ray film at 454 medical offices and 36 hospitals.

• Slash carbon dioxide emissions by 1.6 millions tons

annually.

http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2011/5/4/study-ehrs-can-have-positive-effect-on-environmental-factors.aspx

Global Impact

• Governments are dedicating budgets for health IT

development and adoption.

– Australia - $ 467 million

– UK – $ 1.5 billion

– Japan - $ 1.5 billion

– Germany - $ 1 billion

• Nordic Countries have highest EHR adoption rate.( ~ 90%)

http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture_EMR_Markets_Whitepaper_vfinal.pdf

Future Work

• Private and public sectors are looking to further reduce costs by implementing EHR systems into cloud nodes.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~hongxinh/papers/TrustCol12.pdf

Conclusion

• Integrating Electronic Health Records (EHR) into the

medical infrastructure is critical.

• Governments globally have realized the importance EHR.

• Has the potential to greatly reduce medical industry costs.

• Increases data storage efficiency and accessibility.