A rapidly growing number of health innovations such as mobile apps, diagnostic tools, and sensors are being developed with a focus on enabling health and wellness outside of the traditional medical office visit. As Eric Topol points out in his new book, The Patient Will See You Now, many of these tools will help people independently understand and manage their health. A long history of medical paternalism will be overturned as health information is returned to the individual and autonomy restored. This is a great trend.
However, we do not have to create an “either-or” dynamic where some health information is held by the healthcare system and other information by the individual. These new technologies will be maximally useful when they enable and facilitate a deeper, richer dialogue within the context of existing doctor-patient relationships. To achieve this more coherent and comprehensive healthcare, we need to bring together the patient, her digital health information from new sources, the doctor, and the EHR.
These concepts of interoperability and EHR integration are being widely recognized as crucial over the next few years in healthcare, as evidenced by the JASON Task Force’s recommendations and the formation of the Argonaut Project.
What concerns me as a practicing physician and informaticist is when I hear people discuss EHR integration as if it means only this:
This represents the idea of taking every single data point collected by mobile apps, sensors, and other tools and passing it all straight through into the EHR. I am always reminded of one of my favorite scenes from I Love Lucy, but instead of desperately trying to stuff chocolates into my cheeks and clothing, the medical conveyer belt could make physicians unable to keep up with massive quantities of inbound data from patients.
I think it is this sentiment that has led to articles like this one posted in August 2014, saying that “doctors don’t care about your FitBit data.”
I disagree. The truth is that I might care about your FitBit data, depending on the clinical situation, the context of that data, and the way in which it is presented to me. I just don’t know yet. I think it is very likely that there will be many of these situations where your activity tracker data matters a lot! We can do better. We can use new information sources when they are helpful and add value by weaving together a comprehensive view of a patient’s health information that facilitates better conversations between individuals and their doctors, and thus better care. This means that patient-generated data cannot be siloed off from the EHR. It instead must be incorporated into clinical workflows as part of the EHR. To achieve this vision of a more complete EHR integration, I think we need the following:
Four Key Features of EHR Integration
1: Discrete data points: I know, I know. Didn’t I just say we don’t want this? I actually believe we still do want access to discrete data. It just cannot be the beginning and then end of integration. Also, this refers not just to data coming in to an EHR from outside, but clinical data flowing out from an EHR to an app or analytic tool, such as your medication list, medical history, or recent hemoglobin A1c values.
2: Analytics and decision support: We need intelligent rules, filters, and analytics to help route information at the right time to the right person and right place. These rules will work best if they can use data from inside the EHR along with these new, patient-generated data sources.
3: App and workflow integration: Talented and innovative software developers and others are creating new ways of presenting information, such as disease-specific data visualizations. We need to make it easy for physicians to access these within the context of their daily work in the EHR. Physicians are not going to launch and log-on to their EHR and three different applications to compare data, no matter how snazzy and how much media buzz your new app has. Moreover, we should be able to do clinical documentation, make a therapy change, or order further diagnostic testing from within the confines of a new tool and have that documentation, prescription, or lab “order” feed back into our EHR for action. This will keep your medical chart and health record more comprehensive and easier to follow, with less information scattered around different places.
4: Communications integration: Finally, with all of this information passing back and forth, each system is going to be capable of sending and receiving messages between the doctor, patient, family members, and other care team members. Nobody will want to log-on to every individual account to check messages. So, we need to be able to intelligently integrate and route messages so that each person can send and receive messages from the “hub” application that makes most sense to them.
At the UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation, we are excited to be working toward this vision of comprehensive, workflow-driven EHR integration.
(This post is based on a talk I gave at the Diabetes Technology Meeting in Bethesda, Maryland in November 2014.)