The eHealth industry is undoubtedly at an exciting stage of its development. One of the latest initiatives would be the adoption of the Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Countries that have EHR implementation and on-going EHR implementation are USA, Australia, Canada, UK, and Singapore. The key incentives for governments and healthcare providers move to EHRs are to lower the cost of healthcare, improve patient care, and reduce medical errors.
The term EHR can be defined as a longitudinal electronic record of patient health information generated by one or more encounters in any care delivery setting that is capable of being shared across different health care settings by being embedded in network-connected enterprise-wide environment. It may include a whole range of patient data in comprehensive or summary form, such as patient demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory data and radiology reports. The EHR automates and streamlines the clinician's workflow. The EHR has the ability to generate a complete record of a clinical patient encounter - as well as supporting other care-related activities directly or indirectly via interface - including evidence-based decision support, quality management, and outcomes reporting.
The adoption of national wide EHR holds huge potential for collaboration between healthcare professionals across the healthcare continuum in the provision of patient-centric care as the increased access to medical data serves as a key enabler of personal and holistic care via a single longitudinal view of a patient record. This holds true for clinical researchers in their medical research.
However, a number of privacy and data protection issues can arise in the implementation and operation of EHR systems. Electronic systems make confidential data more easily and rapidly accessible to a wider circle of recipients than paper systems, with associated concerns pertaining to confidentiality and more importantly, the consensus process in releasing or obtaining the medical record. While the implementation has primarily been technological focus, clinically centric and of huge importance in terms of actual adoption, deliberation pertaining to confidentiality has not exactly been of any priority in the agenda.
The technical aspects of EHR strives for the uneventful, secure and speedy transmission of medical data between healthcare professionals but once the data has been delivered, the risk of ‘information leak’ is no longer one pertaining to technology but rather, of polices and governances.
The real challenge to the relevant decision makers is striking the right balance between delicate between patients right to privacy while ensuring timely and unrestricted access of medical information for healthcare providers so information obtain can result in meaningful use.
The data protection challenges created by EHRs provide useful food for thought regarding the ways in which such challenges can be overcome. Regardless of the data protection issues which are raised, the potential benefit offered by EHR systems of delivering efficient and quality patient care at lower cost and significantly improve patient safety are undoutedly very attractive and will stay in the context of both public health care systems and private healthcare.
Published on binaryHealthCare
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