Electronic Patient Health Records
Having just got back from a series of meetings in Cambridge this week at the “Healthcare Special Interest Group – ‘Meet the Clinic: Personal Health Records‘” seminar, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on electronic patient health records and the technology that is currently available and being developed. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive introduction, but just a summary of my understanding and opinion.
You may or may not have heard of Electronic Patient Health Records, or you may have heard of Electronic Health Records, or Health 2.0, or Health 3.0, or Patient Empowerment or even “the ability to securely and confidentially access your GP-held health” and you weren’t quite sure what that meant! It’s understandable, to be honest.
It’s a bit like Web 2.0, the term was used by every digital company going, every piece of marketing, every sales pitch; yet, when you asked someone to define web 2.0, it would usually follow with a long awful silence and some mumbling about big shiny font. Of course, now it’s ‘social media’, but anyway… that’s another story.
Some of you will probably be frustrated, shouting at the screen “Of course I know what electronic patient health records are! It’s my health record, in an electronic format”. You’re not wrong, but you’re not right either. It is your health record, the one your GP stares at on his/her computer screen–that computer screen that you always wondered what was on it, but the angle just wasn’t quite right for you to be able to see what was written about you; well, electronic patient health records now enable both you, and your doctor to stare into the computer screen and view your health notes, and more…
I’m making this sound really great aren’t I? and you want to know where you sign-up and login, don’t you?
Everything is a bit up in the air at the moment, certain groups are playing the thin line of bureaucracy whilst other are fighting to establish their dominance; and this is just within the NHS! Then we actually come to the digitalising of patient health records, which too is still being established and roles defined. So, for the moment I’m going to talk about where we are right now, today.
Was it necessary to do a “war game” about electronic health records to come to that conclusion? Think about it. Patients suffer from different illnesses. Practices and Hospitals don’t want to deal with multiple platforms to treat them however this is not a winners-takes-all market like search engines because switching costs are high (think about moving zillions of data from one product to another and all the training required) and demand is heterogeneous (there are multiple practices). In addition companies like IBM and Microsoft already offer complementary services to the Health Industry so integration is not a crazy outcome. The Big are going to eat the Weak to pump their mature market portfolio and fulfill their growth goals.