Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

The AAFP reported an interesting piece on a request that the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) be used by HHS to carry forward their IT Healthcare goals. While I’m glad I don’t do this kind of political jockeying I love to read about it. Here’s part of the letter that was sent to HHS:

* The CCR standard has been endorsed by multiple physician organizations and health IT vendors and is already in the market and available for use.
* The standard is a comprehensive clinical content standard with 16 sections, including patient demographics, encounters, diagnoses, medications, allergies and immunizations.
* The CCR standard will permit interoperable exchange of personal health data between disparate electronic health record systems used in medical practices.
* The standard is an open standard and is free of licensing fees.

I really need to spend some more time on this subject. I found the Continuity of Care Record(CCR) website. Something that I don’t like already is that their “official CCR Implementation Guide” costs. Maybe this is standard, but I’m not sure I’m ready to pay to see the official guide. I guess they have to fund CCR some way or another.

I saw a really good article that seemed to be starting towards RHIO that everyone wants, but no one wants to work or pay for. The article discusses how Hospitals in Indianapolis have created an RHIO to exhange lab results, radiology reports, and discharge summaries.
It was really nice that it discussed some interesting challenges that face an RHIO. Foremost in my mind is that it requires someone a full day to be able to “copy and paste” the data from the records into a company’s EMR. They are looking at integrating it with HL7 so they don’t have to do this. I guess this is baby steps, but can you imagine having to enter lab result data all day. I did data entry for a while and it’s not any fun. Plus, this isn’t just data entry, but knowing which result field it should be added to in your EMR.
I wonder if they have any plans to integrate some of the data with the CCR standard. I think projects like this and the people behind them are going to really determine the future of medical interactions.