The age of digital information makes more facilities, including medical clinics, implement technologies in their work. It gave a significant push to developing Electronic Health Record systems, which clinics use to keep patients’ health records. However, the system has a crucial disadvantage, which is the lack of interoperability. It can lead to providing inefficient care that can damage patients’ health. The solution for this problem would be centralizing it and creating a cloud-based platform with full accessibility.
One of the significant issues in the healthcare environment is the disparate Electronic Health Care system. Since more medical clinics started to adopt Electronic Health System (EHR), the problem of interoperability started to become more noticeable (Prathap & Mohanasundaram, 2018). Many centers face this problem when sharing the data between different EHR systems. However, it affects not only the clinic but also the quality of patient care. The lack of interoperability may cause the absence of crucial information that would help to treat patients and provide better care (Prathap & Mohanasundaram, 2018). The lack of essential data can cause such problems as failure to recognize previous medication (Wawawrzyniak et al., 2019). For example, if the clinic does not obtain a patient’s medication prescription history, a physician can prescribe wrong or ineffective medication; thus, it can damage a person’s health (Prathap & Mohanasundaram, 2018). It is one of the biggest patient safety concerns at this point.
To control and encourage medical clinics to use EHR, the government created a set of rules and regulations to protect patients’ and providers’ data. Among those regulations is interoperability between different EHR systems, accessibility of the records, and certification (“Laws, Regulation, and Policy,” 2019). In terms of accreditation, it concerns both clinics and providers. The developers of EHR systems must obtain certificates issued by the government that ensures systems’ functionality, security, compliance with other systems, and reliability (“Laws, Regulation, and Policy,” 2019). Moreover, only certified clinics have the right to implement EHR. Accessibility of the records means that all the patients have full access to their records, and in case of changing the physician, their data must be easily accessed (“Laws, Regulation, and Policy,” 2019). Interoperability is supposed to guarantee communication between different clinics to ensure the full understanding of a patient’s health condition and must provide high-quality care (“Laws, Regulation, and Policy,” 2019). However, the last standard has many issues at the moment, which causes different problems for clinics and patients.
One of the ways to improve the interoperability of EHR systems can be by developing a cloud-based or web-based network. It would make accessibility possible from any computer or even from a mobile phone (Wawawrzyniak, et. al., 2019). Therefore, all the data and its digital copies would exist on the online platform, which would also prevent it from damaging or getting lost. Moreover, additional centralizing of the EHR system would keep the data accessible between different clinics, thus improving its interoperability (Blobel, 2018). In this case, implementing blockchain programming would create extra security to avoid non-authorized figures from accessing the information (Blobel, 2018). It would also enhance patients’ safety and provide them with better care.
Solving the problem interoperability of the EHR systems should be a priority to the developers. Nowadays, it takes a broad niche in the field of medical technology. Developing the cloud-based platform with the blockchain for additional data security can help to fix the problem. Physicians in different clinics must be able to communicate with each other to provide better healthcare for patients and ensure their safety.
References
Blobel, B. (2018). Interoperable EHR Systems – Challenges, Standards and Solutions. European Journal for Biomedical Informatics, 14(2). Web.
Laws, Regulation, and Policy. (2019). Web.
Prathap, R., & Mohanasundaram, R. (2018). Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Cloud Protection: The Present Problems. Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience, 15(6), 2227–2232. Web.
Wawawrzyniak, C., Marcilly, R., Baclet, N., Hansske, A., & Pelayo, S. (2019). EHR Usage Problems: A Preliminary Study. Improving Usability, Safety and Patient Outcomes with Health Information Technology, 484–488. Web.