Improved patient portals, Electronic Health Records (EHR) on the cloud, and mobile friendly interactions with patient records and doctor visits without long phone calls to the doctor’s office to try get in two months from now: this is all soon to be possible through the adoption of EHRs and software development companies. The percentage of hospitals that have adopted the use of EHRs has increased from nine percent to 83.8 percent over the past eight years, according to Health Data Management.
The largest increase of EHRs transferred happened between 2014-2015. So far, four of every 10 hospitals can effectively use each other’s EHRs without having to manually translate and enter the patient information. This is expected to change over the next few years as the demand for patients requesting their data through patient portals is dramatically increasing. Just last week the American Medical Association (AMA) met in concern of the interoperability of EHRs between hospitals and other medical facilities. The underlying value of EHRs has just began to be recognized within the past two years. The possibility of easily sharing EHRs securely is becoming more of a reality everyday.
Easily being able to share information between medical facilities once everything is standardized will be the turning point for EHRs and the use of these electronic documents will skyrocket. Due to this, tech companies are going to be hired to build this medical network, but HIPAA is going to be the force that pushes against any kind of movement that is going to make patient data vulnerable. However with AMA, the Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), and the funding of the
government through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) act we’re sure to see positive movement in the near future.
