From Grey Folders to Digital Vaults: The Case for a Centralised Profile
Imagine yourself as a patient with a chronic disease. You have to make frequent rounds to your nearby hospital and maintain a long list of medical documents that you carry in a dull grey folder. If in case you misplace any of the document, you have to make a new one to replace it. Now let’s imagine a situation where unfortunately, you meet with a motor accident and need emergency medical attention. In such a situation, the doctor needs the previous medical record of you which has in it all the drugs and treatment you were under to take several medical calls. In such situation, the dull folder becomes impractical as one cannot carry it everywhere. This is a major limitation on depending on physical document for medical purposes as one cannot summon it immediately when required.
To solve this, major hospitals came up with a system of Electronic Health Record systems (EHRS) which is essentially a profile of an individual which contains the medical history along with the results of health tests and reports. This allows hospitals to retrieve up-to-date medical information on spot and proceed with the treatments. However, a noteworthy impediment persists within this process. It is that different EHR systems adopted by different hospitals face an issue in interoperability. This makes it difficult for a secondary or tertiary healthcare centre to retrieve the medical information from the family physician or other primary healthcare centre which has the medical information of the patient. This forces the individual to get new tests done or get physical copies of the previous documents which can be time consuming and elevate the cost of the already expensive medical treatment.
It is important to note that although the medical information is owned by the individual, the EHR system it is stored on is considered to be the property of the healthcare centre where the individual got his treatment/tests done. Hence, the particular healthcare centre becomes a stakeholder in accessing of this medical information which relates to various technical issues in transferring this data to other centres as mentioned previously.
So what is the fix to this broken system? Well, one might say that having a standardised EHR system across all the hospitals is a viable option. This definitely would solve the persisting issue but only to a certain extent. This is because the regulating policies regarding medical information and its sharing varies not only from country to country but also from one state to the other. Also, the small healthcare centres use less expensive EHR systems whereas the big hospitals require a much more expensive EHR system catering to their different needs.
To find a fix, we need to drive the conversation outside the EHRs owned by healthcare centres. In my opinion, the solution lies in creating a centralised place for individuals to create their medical profile which will be similar to Facebook profiles but making it highly encrypted and thus much more secure. This will make the individual the sole stakeholder of that information and further allow all the hospitals to access it by taking the consent of the individual or a close family relative in certain cases. Taking other healthcare centres out of the equation makes the entire process of retrieving information much more streamlined and simple. This will also reduce the enormous expenses of setting up EHR systems that hospitals often have to bear. Instead, they can resort to more simplistic forms of EHR to keep records only for medico-legal purposes rather than spending extra to try to make it compatible with EHR systems in other hospitals as that purpose is now served with a centralised medical profile.
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