Imagine a world where a patient can visit any healthcare provider around the globe, and that provider has access to your entire health history and lifestyle habits within minutes, enough to diagnose what ails you and provide relief and treatment options. Imagine also a healthcare system that offers valuable insights to the provider along the way — like a little genie sitting on their shoulder, prompting necessary actionable insights based on evidence. That world might be years away at best, but the path to get there is less hypothetical than ever. The traditional Electronic Medical Record (EMR) needs to undergo a sea change from a simple bookkeeping platform between patient and provider into something far more comprehensive.
We are missing the point if we imagine the future of EMRs without acknowledging the great work ahead of us to democratize access to healthcare data, improve care outcomes, and lighten the burden with manual work for physicians in the process. For any of these to happen, EMRs must first be interoperable to create a lifetime medical record, with discovery windows of unique snapshots over a patient’s lifetime. Despite the Sequoia Project’s report that found life-threatening consequences still exist due to gaps in interoperability, the topic of interoperability in health trade headlines is trending downward according to a recent analysis by healthcare journalists. Why?
Let’s discuss why we can’t take our foot off the gas, because interoperability is critical to fully imagine the EMR of tomorrow. And we can more powerfully layer on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies such as generative AI – to achieve sweeping efficiencies in a resource-constrained healthcare system – when the patient (data) journey is a more connected one.
Evolution of the traditional EMR: How we got here
As the age of big data dawned, the primary challenge has shifted — are today’s EMRs interoperable enough to be useful at every touchpoint in a patient’s journey? Is critical data missing when a patient switches providers? Can specialists pressed to treat a life-threatening disease access data from their patient’s primary care provider at a moment’s notice? Despite decades of digital healthcare interoperability efforts, achieving it has been slow to take effect. But the potential for EMRs to harness the power of interoperability, to democratize data and to make it accessible across the continuum of care is clear.
The push toward greater interoperability holds the potential to create a better, more resilient healthcare ecosystem. Along with this, the potential of AI to mine the EMR for key insights for different stakeholders — patients, providers, pharmacists and payers — cannot be ignored.
Recent advancements
New use-cases of EMRs are constantly emerging to meet industry demands. Take the basic checkup between a patient and their primary care provider. Improving that clinical experience for patients can be as simple as embedding an AI tool into a clinician’s existing workflow, saving time and making their work more efficient. Early use-cases have seen some of these tools reduce the time a provider spends looking at a screen to update the EMR during appointments, and by extension increasing their time spent interacting with patients. Administrative work (namely, EMR upkeep) has also consistently been linked to provider burnout, suggesting AI tools can help improve the long-term outlook for clinicians as well.
Historically, the EMR captured acute patient episodes with one provider. The EMR is that too, but now that patients interact with all sorts of tools that collect health data — not just doctors and nurses — what else ought to go into an EMR to create the most holistic, accurate, personalized medical snapshot? Consider these recent advancements in health monitoring:
- All the personal devices you own that collect data: your Peloton, your sleep tracker band, your FitBit, your home scale
- Nutritional data: the food journal, any over-the-counter medication and supplements you’re taking, etc.
- Any other data inputs (i.e., digital medical instruments) that lead clinicians to a more personalized version of healthcare and better outcomes for patients
Connecting every disparate platform in the healthcare ecosystem, while preserving the data collected and organized by AI tools at every step along the patient journey, remains an essential challenge. Investing in those underlying platform capabilities now will determine how quickly the EMR achieves its full utility in the future.
The future
The provider should have the most up-to-date information about a patient’s lifestyle habits, symptoms and genetics offered up in a longitudinal view. The patient should be able to walk away clearly understanding lifestyle interventions and clinical therapies that will either relieve their condition or manage it, ultimately reducing the progress of disease over time. Getting to this ideal vision of a perfectly portable medical snapshot will require incremental progress.
Here are a few examples:
- EMRs that allow providers to make medical decisions more quickly based on the contents of an interoperable system by using AI technologies to create summaries that eliminate hunting or “copying and pasting”
- Chatbots that offer clinicians personalized solutions upon request (i.e., the hypothetical “genie” on the doctor’s shoulder)
- Periodic text- or email-based health reminders, at the patient’s request, based on personalized medical history
- EMRs that inform prior authorization and concurrent authorization decisions without bias, using AI models to recognize trends and make predictions
The only way to achieve the EMR’s full potential and universal patient snapshots that travel with the patient throughout their care journey – is to open up the healthcare ecosystem, where no singular system is master. And the only way to comprehensively achieve AI-driven efficiencies so EMR data can enable clinicians to work smarter, not harder, is to layer these advanced technologies on top of that. For these reasons, we need to reinvigorate the topic of interoperability, by not just talking about it, but by doing everything we can as a collective industry to achieve it.
About Mallika Edwards
Mallika Edwards is the Chief Product Officer with Xsolis, the AI-driven technology company fostering collaboration between healthcare providers and payers, where she is responsible for the strategy and roadmap of the Xsolis solutions portfolio.