Jane Sarasohn-Kahn has a great chart on her Health Populi blog which shows how healthcare shares health data:
The chart is great even if the results are pretty awful. Plus, the data is a little dated. I wonder how those numbers have changed since early 2015.
Amazing that the top 3 forms of data exchange in healthcare were old analogue technologies: paper, information (phone), and fax.
This will come as no surprise to anyone in healthcare. I do find it interesting that the 4th most popular method is scanning the documents directly to the provider. That illustrates that most clinics would love to have an electronic option for sharing data, but there’s not an easier way. The options that are currently available are too hard. If they were easier, then I believe almost every practice would adopt them.
With all the benefits of direct exchanges, HIE, portals, Direct, FHIR, etc, it’s amazing that a simple document scan sent directly to a clinic is more popular. It makes me take a step back and wonder if we’ve over complicated the process of health data exchange.
Would the best option be to step back and make exchange much easier? Could we strip out all the extra features that are nice but impede participation from so many?
I can’t wait for the day that my health data is available wherever it’s needed. The first step to that reality might be taking a step back and simplifying the exchange of data.
John,
I recently had some basic tests in a major lab, with the results available on their portal. I checked the EPIC portal for my doctor (a major institution) and found nothing; a nurse told me that they have absolutely no way to take info from an outside lab and put it into EPIC. They can’t even type it! To say that this is scary… I wonder how my doctor gets to see it.
I have trouble comprehending how this can be so difficult between an EPIC system and one of the larger lab companies out there.
Ron