Johannesburg, 27 Sep 2021
Healthcare facilities process unbelievably large amounts of data daily, the majority of which is very sensitive information. Most worryingly is that a lot of these facilities still use handwritten documents which are stored on the premises, exposing them to all manner of risks.
The introduction of electronic health records (eHRs) or electronic medical records (eMRs) was not much help either as these were highly non-reliable and still required a lot of human interaction that takes away valuable time with your patients and are still susceptible to errors and all manner of cyber risks.
Hlengekile Jita, Clinical Product Manager at Altron HealthTech, explains: “Technology trends such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are revolutionising how people work and live, healthcare being no exception.”
“AI’s ability to analyse and recognise patterns and trends from copious amounts of data can promptly provide insights and support medical practitioners in their daily workflows. With all our devices being smart, why shouldn’t your eHR system be?” asks Jita.
Intelligent eHRs can create an opportunity for human and AI collaboration that brings together the strengths of medical practitioners to provide care and the strengths of AI to automate and leverage data to generate insights. Jita further adds that “clinical systems need to use advanced data analytics to provide insights and support workflows to improve care”.
Intelligent eHRs should be able to leverage the relationship between medical professionals and patients while providing a cheaper, faster and more effective solution for the health sector.
Opportunities
- To deliver better patient outcomes;
- Support clinical processes to provide quality care;
- Achieving practice efficiencies;
- Improving the usability of eHRs;
- Decision support/automation; and
- Challenges of current eHR systems.
As with most technology interventions, there are a lot of challenges facing the evolution of eHRs. Although the initial development of eHRs can be traced back to the 1970s, the continuous redevelopment and refining of the solution allows for us to still consider some difficulties as “teething problems”.
In the article: “4 Reasons Why eHR Interoperability is a Mess (and How to Fix It)”, the high cost of integration is identified as one of the chief challenges on the uptake of eHRs. This in addition to healthcare providers often using multiple technology systems, which makes it difficult to share data across the sector.
Concerns of phishing attacks, malware and ransomware, encryption blind spots, cloud threats and employees are also among the top threats to eHRs. Reported data breaches such as those experienced by the Life Healthcare Group in 2020 are reminders of these security concerns.
Although the group moved swiftly to foil those attacks, questions and concerns regarding the safety of patient information in healthcare systems remain top of mind even as systems get improved and developed.
Addressing interoperability
When a patient presents at a hospital, that facility still requires records from other practices and/or other hospitals that the patient had visited previously to get the full picture of the patient’s health. The eHR system of the future needs to have a workaround for this problem, a solution that allows for different systems to be able to communicate through codes, to allow for health facilities to have access to this crucial information, which will lead to even better patient outcomes. Technology has given us endless possibilities. eHRs make delivering better patient outcomes as seamless as possible. Putting healthcare in the hands of patients so they can monitor their habits and make conscious health decisions in between doctor visits is an idea worth pursuing.
For example, sports teams put trackers on their players, to monitor heart rate, distance covered during a match, breathing patterns, etc. These trackers are then used to build analytics and provide an in-depth understanding of areas of concern and where growth areas should be explored. The technical team does not need to physically sit with a player to discuss where they should be growing. All this information can be retrieved from the tracking device.
The intelligent eHR should allow for an exchange of information with healthcare trackers that can be worn by patients and the data is readily available to be processed without any hassles.
Data privacy and trust
In the same breath as interoperability, one can mention data privacy and trust, although interoperability is ideal. The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) also needs to be factored in.
Personal information and health records are “gold” for hackers. A KFF poll published in 2019 revealed that over half the people who had eHRs reported feeling “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” that an unauthorised person might get access to their confidential medical records and information. This is an opportunity for future her systems to address any security concerns, futuristic cyber security measures should be put into place to ensure that security concerns are mitigated.
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a host of challenges to all sectors; healthcare is no exception. Many agree that things will never be the same again. However, we cannot discount the opportunities that this pandemic has also presented.
The need for advanced healthcare systems has never been greater than what it has been under this pandemic. With large numbers of people having been displaced, with all the interventions made in the healthcare industry, health records remain a huge problem in the sector, leading to people being misdiagnosed due to lack of health data history. The need for a smarter, intelligent eHR solution is now greater than ever before.
“At Altron HealthTech, we are embarking on a journey to re-imagine our electronic healthcare record (eHR) products. Leveraging design thinking principles, we have recognised a need to deeply understand the problems we are solving for our users to design the best solution,” concludes Jita.
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