When designing a new Electronic Health Record (EHR), organisational and regulatory aspects must also be considered.
Patient care is and will increasingly be carried out with professionals working in different care settings or healthcare facilities. The hub & spoke hospital model, the integrated management of diseases, the diagnostic and clinical workflow are some examples in which care processes are now sequential and “not connected“.
There is, therefore, a need to create a platform capable of tracking these clinical and care processes and supporting their execution. It is a matter of recording events and activities with a set of information that allows them to take place. In other words, the aim of the EHR 2.0 should not be limited to documenting medical practice and patient care: it should be the tool par excellence with which to manage transversal clinical processes.
The “taking charge” is, for example, an event to be traced and managed by the EHR 2.0 with a set of information that could be updated over time.
On the contrary, an example of a transversal activity is the request of a doctor for a consultation or a diagnostic examination from a colleague who works in another healthcare facility, both in ordinary mode and through telemedicine platforms. Today EHR foresees prescriptions that are documents born to regulate the administrative aspect of the process. It is true that the prescription includes the diagnostic question but, in many cases, it is necessary to have a clinical picture of the patient to formulate a more accurate opinion.
In the few cases in which these processes have been computerized, there is a software platform, third in respect to the EHR, which plays this role. In the majority of cases, it is the patient who brings his clinical documentation with him and describes his clinical case to the doctor. If in the first case privacy quite well managed through the software platform, in the second case the patient decides himself what to show and tell the doctor.
To achieve the “connected care” it is therefore necessary, first of all, to connect the medical and welfare processes, implementing the logic and information within a new EHR that would be the platform of choice to perform this task, not to be limited to the mere preservation of existing documents.
There is, of course, another aspect to consider and manage: the privacy policy. I will talk about this in a later article.
Stay tuned! – to be continued
Digital-health 