Guest Post: Overcoming EMR Integration Challenges

Dan Neuwirth is the CEO of MedCPU, provider of the innovative MedCPUAdvisor™ platform: with applications for decision support for clinical guidelines, Meaningful Use, and care pathways, that captures the complete clinical picture in real time, including narrative text and structured data to deliver the most accurate clinical and compliance guidance.

There’s no question that healthcare needs to adopt new technology that makes us more effective and efficient and curbs costs, like Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solutions and Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems. In today’s world, providers of all sizes continue to find it challenging to integrate existing HIT systems with EMRs for a variety of reasons. As our industry evolves, technology solutions need to be smarter and empower seamless integration.

EMR and HIPAA guest author Susan White covers in depth how a lack of connectivity standards affects EMR integration. There are no mandated standards for EMR vendors to follow, making it hard to coordinate data sharing between medical devices and other systems (including from one EMR to another), even at the same facility. As those systems operate in disparate fashions, critical clinical information is often lost or stuck in silos. Most importantly, the information is not where clinicians need it most–at their fingertips, in an exam room, with a patient.

This lack of data sharing is a pervasive concern. One Markle report finds that roughly 80 percent of both consumers and physicians demand that hospitals and doctors be required to share information that improves coordination of care, cuts unnecessary costs, and reduces medical errors.

In 2010, more than $88 Billion were spent on developing and implementing EHRs, health information exchanges (HIEs) and other health IT initiatives. When you consider that the average 10-physician practice spends more than $137,000 per year on prior authorizations and pharmacy callbacks alone, you’ll have to agree that the lack of data integration and sharing get very costly. And although I agree with John Halamka, who recently wrote these challenges exist because healthcare is inherently more complicated than other industries, I am a strong believer that a lot of them can be overcome by the use of smart technology.

We need smart, flexible solutions, which capitalize on existing technologies and require minimal integration. Technologies that employ advanced screen extraction, for example, empower several important improvements in the clinical decision support space such as the capturing and analysis of both free and structured text. A lot of time such solutions are rendered ineffective as they either lack compatibility with leading EMR systems or are too hard to integrate.

As the industry evolves, developing robust protocols for capturing both structured and unstructured data along with standards for data integration and sharing will become increasingly important. With all the data points created on patients every day, we will need a consistent, secure, and reliable way to capture and share patient data among all systems and healthcare providers. What is your experience? What are top data capturing and integration challenges faced by your organization? Looking forward to continuing the dialog and hearing your feedback.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

7 Comments

  • Uhh, what?

    This “What are top data capturing and integration challenges faced by your organization?”
    is hospital-IT-speak, or, yes, large private practice speak.

    A small private medical practice says, “can your equipment talk to my EHR?”

    Mostly gone are the days of a PM of one brand and an EHR of another.

    That is where data integration challenges occurred.

    Sure medicine is different, but only if you hold out your hand to the government for them to reimburse you.

    Being different, though, is not an excuse.

    The short answer to why medicine has been slow to react go to EHRs is there is not ROI.

    ROI on a PM is easy to figure.

    ROI on an EHR? Good luck.

    I think going electronic is smart, but nobody wants to be forced to spend time and money on a system that doesn’t show an ROI.

    Oh, and firing your transcriber is on ROI.

  • You state that,”In 2010, more than $88 Billion were spent on developing and implementing EHRs.”

    It would be very interesting and helpful to have a citation to your source. Thanks!

  • Hi Greg,
    I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe I got listed for some good keywords, but I think you’re the fourth or fifth person this week that’s talked to me about the whole process of dealing with the existing paper charts. Looks like the companies are swarming around this market.

    I’ve written some posts about it before and I have some more on the way. So, subscribe to the email list and you’ll get them as I post them: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/emr-and-hipaa-email-subscription/

  • Hi Greg,

    For MedCPU specifically, we can scan paper charts into our system using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and then analyze them. Any typed notes, PDF, etc. can be extracted and analyzed by our system.

    Thanks,
    Dan

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