Why EHR's?
It is widely believed that the adoption and use of interoperable, electronic health records throughout Alaska and the U.S., will improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare delivery.
President Obama has made health technology including EHRs and their private, secure exchange a centerpiece of his plan for health reform. It is widely believed the greatest challenge is the private, one to five practitioners' office. These groups provide up to 65% of the health care in the United States and are the prominent practice style in Alaska.
The hospitals, community health centers, and large practice groups have EHR's, are in the process of implementing them, or are actively planning on using them. Alaska's greatest challenge will be establishing EHR's in the small, practice site and developing an interoperable system between sites. This is the Alliance's primary initial focus.
Benefits
For Health Care Providers:
- Improved access to personal medical data
- Improved longevity and health status
- Reduced reliance on memory or incomplete records when seeing multiple physicians
- Complete medical records
- Improved access to test results in a timely fashion
- Improved ability to self-manage chronic disease
- Improved privacy and security safeguards
For Clinicians:
- Improved satisfaction among patients
- Remote access to patients' charts and speed of access to more complete medical data
- Reduction in lost charts
- Incorporation of standards to help improve patient outcomes and reduce medical errors
- Accurate and actionable medical information in a secure and private form, when and where it is needed by the clinicians who care for patients
- Templates that improve charge capture and documentation while reducing risks of fines associated with audits
- Improved timeliness of data
- Reduced reliance on manual transcriptions
In addition to the universal challenges to healthcare such as improving safety, reducing cost, facilitating access, and improving outcomes, Alaska faces unique problems due to its large geographic size and small population. A significant portion of the population lives in areas without enough people to support an efficient, full service health system. Our plan, working in partnership with the Alaska eHealth Network, structures an EHR network to improve efficiency and effectiveness in Alaska by reducing medical errors, eliminating unnecessary and duplicative services (e.g. lab tests, prescription medications) automating follow-up and preventive interventions, and increasing patient's involvement in care.
For Payers:
- Reduction in the cost of care as a result of reduction in duplicate clinical tests
- Increased ease and efficiency of access to records when appropriate
- Reduced cost of care related to medication errors and undesirable outcomes resulting from poor access to patient clinical data
- Decreased long-term cost of care resulting from a healthier population utilizing screening reminders and best practice alerts for wellness management
For Communities:
- Automated bi-directional, standards-based reporting of critical public health information to state and local public health agencies
- Reduced excess health system cost or usage
- Quicker and simpler audits/results
- Secure, backed-up, accessible medical data in case of a natural or man-made disaster