23 Feb Report: Crises at Flint, Hollywood Presbyterian show importance of electroinc health records
Research firm Kalorama Information says $25 billion EHR market will continue to grow, despite the hits.
Kalorama Information says electronic health record systems are here to stay after recent situations in Flint, Michigan and Hollywood Presbyterian in which electronic medical records played key roles in times of crisis.
In Flint, Michigan, where residents are dealing with a lead poisoning water crisis, the lead was discovered as the result of searches conducted using data from an Epic EHR system.
Paper records would have failed the community, Kalorama claimed in its report, “EMR 2015: The Market for Electronic Medical Records.”
In Flint, the key physician involved in the case reviewed the EHRs of the children whose blood had been tested at the local hospital. Paper records alone would not have lent themselves to the kind of research needed to detect patterns, Kalorama researchers said.
“The side benefit of EMR conversion, aside from cost savings, is that practice would improve and providers, academics and governments could obtain better epidemiological information,” said Kalorama Information Publisher Bruce Carlson in a statement.
“The visibility of the Flint, Michigan, story provides a real-world example of the benefits oft-stated during the conversion and incentive campaign,” he said.
The Kalorama report also points to EHR’s vulnerabilities – most notably the recent case of medical data being held hostage by hackers at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, which ultimately opted to pay $17,000 to rescue its information from cybercriminals.