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 Just 30 percent of hospitals had achieved so-called interoperability
as of 2015, the study found. While that’s slight improvement over
the previous year, when 25 percent met this goal, it shows hospitals
still have a long way to go, researchers report in Health Affairs.
“What this means is there is potentially a significant amount of
waste and inefficiency in hospitals,” said lead study author Jay
Holmgren of Harvard Business School in Boston.
Without access to patient records, doctors might re-order tests that
have already been done somewhere else, or make treatment decisions
without a full picture of any allergies or underlying medical
conditions.
“And, without a system for getting electronic patient data to
clinicians, the responsibility falls on patients and their families,
who often resort to bringing printouts of records from one hospital
to another,” Holmgren said by email. “It just adds to the burden of
being sick.”
For the study, researchers examined survey data from hospitals that
belong to the American Hospital Association (AHA).
The study found that hospitals across the country have focused
primarily on moving electronic health records from one institution
to another, rather than on integrating relevant subsets of
information - for example, clinical notes, lab tests and other
patient information - in ways that would allow clinicians to easily
learn what they need to know without having to read through a
patient's entire record.
While 43 percent of hospitals reported that outside patient
information was available electronically when necessary in 2015,
more than one-third reported that they rarely or never used it.
The most common barrier these hospitals reported to using outside
information was that their clinicians could not see it embedded into
their own system's electronic health record.
Just 19 percent of hospitals said they often used data from outside
providers.
“Sharing electronic information between hospitals has been poor for
many years,” said Dean Sittig, a biomedical informatics researcher
at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston who
wasn’t involved in the study.
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“At first, we blamed it on lack of data in electronic form, and now
that the vast majority of hospitals have electronic health records
and therefore the data is in electronic form, we need another
excuse,” Sittig said by email.
“The findings in this article say that for the most part, hospitals
are still not sharing data and even fewer are actually integrating
that shared information into their electronic health records,”
Sittig added.
To compensate, patients often obtain copies of records that they
deliver in person to an outside provider or request that they be
sent, said Ann Kutney-Lee, a researcher at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia who wasn’t involved
in the study.
Patients also have some options to manage their own records
electronically.
“Patients can create their own online Personal Health Record (PHR)
where they can store, manage, and share health information all in a
single location - although all of the data would initially need to
be collected by the patient and then manually uploaded,” Kutney-Lee
said by email. “Most of these websites are free and are accessible
by computer or smartphone.”
Increasing numbers of health care providers and hospitals are also
offering patients access to online portals that contain all lab
work, health histories, and test results performed by that provider,
hospital, or healthcare system.
“Although many of these portals do not yet link with outside
providers, patients could enter this information into a personal
health record themselves,” Kutney-Lee said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2xcoxvn Health Affairs, online October 2,
2017.
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