Reprinted with permission © 2008 TreeTop Technologies
One of the key skill areas in life science IT right now is the ability to leverage the power of Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Electronic patient health records started to gain favor in the 1990s.
However, adoption of such technology has been slow among physicians, with only a quarter or so of them using EMR. Even among the adopters, partial EMR systems are the norm. Complications around patient privacy and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act haven’t helped.
EMR has been making inroads in other areas of life sciences as well. This indicates a larger, and more long-term, need to coordinate systems and to maintain databases in the best possible way. For example, insurance companies and hospitals would like to see EMR used as a means to reduce costs.
Action Item: To do this, EMR needs to link best practices and patient outcomes. EMR would be used to help create systems in which the computers in a physician’s office aren’t simply used to store data, but to help improve medical decisions.
Footnotes: From "View from the TreeTop" Volume 2 Issue 7 July 2008