Cloud Support Improves EHRs
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
According to Judy Hanover, Research Director at IDC Health Insights, the cloud brings innovation to EHR technology.
Movement to the cloud could drastically improve healthcare outcomes according to Judy Hanover, research director at IDC Health Insights. “We’re doing a lot in the industry to look for improvements for productivity and accuracy of clinical treatment,” Hanover told EHR Intelligence about technologies impacting healthcare. “The new concept of flexible, mobile, cloud-based acute care EHR supports digitizing paper workflow and reengineering processes.”
Hanover wrote in her research for IDC that healthcare organizations have a clear need for EHR solutions built on the cloud. “These future systems will provide mobile clinical documentation and structured and unstructured data capture, a service-based architecture that delivers strong integration options for best-of-breed solutions in departments and among collaborating providers, and big data analytics to offer decision support and tackle business problems, security, mobility, and secure collaboration in accountable delivery communities.”
Not all healthcare providers have the same needs, and often, they find their EHR does not support the goals they are trying to reach. Because many EHR software don’t allow for flexibility, it is nearly impossible to make changes to them. “There are different goals that health systems have that aren’t well-implemented in the current generations of EHRs,” Hanover stated. “They’re expensive. The total cost of ownership for the software is really high for what’s delivered. They’re very difficult to change and aren’t flexible.”
That’s why she believes cloud based EHRs could be the solution to this obstacle and could meet the needs of providers where previous systems could not.
“When we look at the EHRs that are in hospitals now, we have very limited specialty-specific functionality,” Hanover explained. “We have a one-size-fits all approach to the interface. When it comes to addressing the clinical question that we see in different specialties, we don’t have specialty-specific workflows or specialty-specific decision-making.”
“The [cloud-based] platform approach brings different apps into the healthcare environment,” Hanover continued. “Dermatology might be using a different app to enter data into their system than cardiology is but they’re writing their data to the same platform that’s available for analytics. Also, a lot of productivity issues could be eased by mobile functionality as well as real-time interactive decision support.”