Building an Interoperable Medical Tech Platform – One Step at a Time

An amusing post by Katherine Hobson at Wall Street Journal caught my eye the other day.  In her post, Who’s Behind Fake Electronic-Medical Records Company Extormity?, Katherine talks about what one company did in response to the frustration it experienced trying to sell its PHR and EHR technologies to doctors.   

Because of numerous failed deployments, PHR and EHR technologies have gotten a pretty bad rap with doctors. Some enterprising fellows decided to create a fake company to parody the entire situation. The founders have lifted the lid recently, revealing their true identities. Whether this was a marketing ploy or a genuine parody is debatable, but either way, every joke has a grain of truth. 

We stand at an interesting, albeit frustrating crossroads in the health technology space today. A fully interoperable, collaborative platform that integrates health information and personalized patient data to facilitate empowered provider and patient decision making lies just within reach. Think of the value patients will get once PHRs can stream in personalized data from their customized doctor-patient communications platform and EHRS, while also reviewing anonymous data from the broader patient population that helps them gain perspective on their condition. The technology is all there, it’s just a matter of implementing it in the right fashion, and achieving greater adoption of course. 

Certain proposed infrastructural changes are underway that promise to speed up the evolution of this space. Health providers’ responsibility for managing quality of care throughout the entire patient journey is not only being enforced with acts like HIPPA HITECH, it also could be incentivized even further through the proposed changes to ACO programs with the new healthcare bill. Remote monitoring and electronic communications with patients will be necessary to keep this complex, integrated new system afloat.  

Now is the time to improve the tools we have in place for aiding communication between doctors and patients, and these tools need to be personalized to each patient.  I’m looking forward to continuing the many initiatives we already have underway to bring this issue, and bring our achievements, to the forefront of our industry. 

As always, appreciate your comments.

Gene