Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

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.

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