The market is saturated with hundreds of EMR/EHR/PHR systems. Most of them are inefficient systems that disrupt physicians’ work flow, adding little value to delivering better care. This is more than mere lack of insight on behalf of software engineers and points to a more important barrier to smart health IT design where the needs and changing requirements of third parties (i.e. insurance companies) often supersede that of patients and doctors. As a result, most health IT systems end up being clunky billing machines, focusing mostly on capturing data that satisfy the needs of payers and regulators, not providers and patients. Enhancing the doctor-patient relationship, the foundation of delivering effective care, has rarely been the focus of health IT. Neither has been capturing and analyzing data that can have a positive impact on clinical outcomes.
I think practical health IT should be Intelligent, Integrated, and Interoperable. Intelligently designed systems prioritize the needs of patients and providers. An electronic platform with well-integrated features ensures a consistent and smooth operator experience. Interoperability stands as a prerequisite to deriving real societal value from health IT and facilitates health information exchange among networks of patients and providers.
