Interest in Electronic Medical Records (EMR) has surged in recent few years. This has been fueled by new healthcare industry regulations and generous grants from the government. Studies show that providers who expect to see quality improvements from deploying EMR systems alone will be disappointed.
In a 2007 study published in Archives of Internal Medicine, Jeffery Linder, et al, found that use of EMR solution made no difference in performance outcomes, measured using 17 ambulatory quality measures. Although the technology showed an immediate and direct impact on safety related concerns in an inpatient setting, EMRs were not associated with healthcare quality improvements in outpatient setting.
I believe, to improve quality of chronic care, reduce costs and raising provider productivity the EMR systems need to be integrated with Chronic Disease Management Systems (CDMS) or Disease Registries or Clinical Information Systems (CIS). EMRs are primarily built to support the documentation of care, and CDMS solutions are built to support improvement of care.
Data collected by EMR systems cannot be very easily used to perform patient population and sub-population analysis and reporting. This analysis is critical for active chronic care management. Although, EMR vendors are often able to provide custom programming assistance to address these requirements, the changes to the software are expensive and slow.
An integrated EMR & CDM system enables implementation of best practice chronic care management solutions. The integrated system provides all the essential information about patient’s chronic care and prevention plan. The integrated system utilizes evidence based guidelines and protocols to support in active chronic care management. The integrated system has the ability to capture patient vitals and key indicators in an outpatient setting and trigger appropriate alerts to care team for follow-up care related activities. The integrated system also enables reporting at population level for improvements in delivering chronic care services.
Advantages of having integrated EMR-CDM systems include:
- Measurable cost savings due to active preventive care management that reduces cost burden across the different healthcare system components (payors and providers)
- Reduction of frequent visits of patients to clinic and its facilities
- Reduction in Healthcare aides/Nurses visiting patients to collect patient vital signs records
- Elimination of paper record keeping and improved workflow automation
- Lighten the burden on Nurses
- Effective chronic care management with emphasis on prevention techniques to contain disease escalation
- Effective/Efficient & Secure collaboration platform for care providers/payor groups to improve quality of care and contain costs
- Improvement in quality of care due to automatic monitoring of patient vital signs
- A reporting platform that enables healthcare policy makers and organization leaders to monitor and improve quality of care while controlling costs