The people at the Mayo Clinic are doing some research on making electronic health records (EHRs) more intelligent and useful to doctors. Thanks to Brian Robinson at Government Health IT writing on “the ultimate health care record” for the heads up.
Robinson writes that smart EHRs could lead the way to a “minimally invasive informatics”, one that would not require disruptive changes in the way physicians manage their practices. These EHRs would go well beyond the current technology of simply collecting data in small, categorized areas of a record. He cites Dr. Peter Elkin, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, who with his colleagues have proposed intelligent EHRs as a way of “squeezing all kinds of information out of an electronic record without physicians adding any more tasks to their day.”
Intelligent EHRs would try to address both the current physician resistance to EHR adoption as well as the desire to maximize the secondary health care benefits that electronic records would offer in areas such as promoting evidence-based medicine and improving public health surveillance. But, as Robinson observes, these systems will have to deliver the ROI goods if they’re going get off the academic farm and go into the big city.
