Remember when ATMs and online banking first appeared on the scene?  Most people were afraid to input their personal and financial information due to security risks. Now, the use of ATMs are so common place that it would be difficult to find many people refusing to avail themselves of these benefits.

So it is with EHR systems (electronic health records). As time passes, there will be much greater acceptance of digitalized medical records.  Patients and doctors will see the advantages that having accessible data online or “in the cloud” provides great advantages.

Back in 2009 when physicians and healthcare facilities were federally mandated to implement EHRs and “go digital”, professionals and patients went ballistic instead.  Well, where are we now in the process?

Donald Simborg published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association sharing his predictions for the progress of health IT over the next five years.

He sees interoperability issues being ironed out.  From inception of the electronic adoption, there had been problems with interfacing computers from various systems, different vendors and different locations.  According to Simborg:

“We’ve got more standards than we can deal with. The problem is the buyers of healthcare–the hospitals, the big healthcare organizations, the integrated delivery networks. Once can i buy ventolin ventolin apteka online online they see it’s in their economic interest to demand that the vendors be interoperable, that will change things. But so far, they haven’t done that.”

 Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health IT, was asked by Rep. Dr. Michael Burgess of Texas, why interoperability wasn’t built in to the systems. Mostashari replied ”We want to really work with the industry to get consensus and accelerate this.”

A survey by Price Waterhouse Cooper revealed that only 53% of physicians polled said that their systems interface with other technologies within the healthcare system.

Simborg and his associates predict that there will be a blurring of the line between telemedicine and EHR usage.  He told an interviewer at InformationWeek that “More and more medicine will happen through the internet.  Lots of healthcare will happen without there being a physical encounter and the EHR will have to cope with patient inputs a lot more.  So we won’t call it telemedicine anymore.”

Perhaps this is paving the way for electronic doctors as well?!

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