Progress along developmental tracks for electronic health records implementation in the United States
- PDF / 303,427 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 610 x 792 pts Page_size
- 75 Downloads / 139 Views
BioMed Central
Open Access
Review
Progress along developmental tracks for electronic health records implementation in the United States David W Hollar Address: School of Medicine, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA Email: David W Hollar - [email protected]
Published: 16 March 2009 Health Research Policy and Systems 2009, 7:3
doi:10.1186/1478-4505-7-3
Received: 19 September 2007 Accepted: 16 March 2009
This article is available from: http://www.health-policy-systems.com/content/7/1/3 © 2009 Hollar; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract The development and implementation of electronic health records (EHR) have occurred slowly in the United States. To date, these approaches have, for the most part, followed four developmental tracks: (a) Enhancement of immunization registries and linkage with other health records to produce Child Health Profiles (CHP), (b) Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) demonstration projects to link together patient medical records, (c) Insurance company projects linked to ICD-9 codes and patient records for cost-benefit assessments, and (d) Consortia of EHR developers collaborating to model systems requirements and standards for data linkage. Until recently, these separate efforts have been conducted in the very silos that they had intended to eliminate, and there is still considerable debate concerning health professionals access to as well as commitment to using EHR if these systems are provided. This paper will describe these four developmental tracks, patient rights and the legal environment for EHR, international comparisons, and future projections for EHR expansion across health networks in the United States.
Background Factors that have contributed to the United States' drive for electronic health records systems include a growing, more diverse American population, increasing socioeconomic and health disparities, a significant percentage of Americans who have no health insurance and the lack of socialized medicine or "universal" insurance coverage, a distributed medical system that emphasizes specialization over general practice in predominantly urban areas, poorer per capita health cost-benefit ratios, and a high incidence of medical errors [1-5]. With respect to the last point, The Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year due to preventable medical errors [2]. During July, 2003, a national consensus conference of over 100 leading American health professionals, coordi-
nated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, identified the core components, goals, and mechanisms for implementing a National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII; see List of Abbreviations) with a corresponding National Health Information N
Data Loading...
