What Is Your EMR Connectivity Strategy?
Healthcare Interoperability
Overview
“Have it your way.” This famous slogan has become part of the hamburger competitive advertising folklore as McDonalds and Burger King fought for market share. As you may remember, the positioning was McDonalds only prepared hamburgers one way, and Burger King would add or take off items to fit your tastes.
Approaching integration with Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is much the same way. There are, however, two central questions:
- How responsive do you want to be in establishing EMR connections to clinics, imaging centers, and laboratories?
- How flexible do you want to be in adapting to the different EMR data specifications?
How your organization answers these questions will drive your EMR approach. How your healthcare organization delivers connectivity to EMRs will be quickly recognized in the marketplace. Ultimately, it will likely affect the number of referrals received from various physicians and the strength of a long term relationship.
This paper will outline the EMR integration approach options and the resulting attributes for your organization.
EMR Integration Standards
EMR adoptions stands at an estimated 24% and is growing fast. EMRs are being used by various healthcare providers to collect and store patient information and their medical history.
Although EMRs hold a great deal of value to all involved in the healthcare community, there are several challenges to overcome in order to achieve the ultimate goal of efficient delivery of quality patient care.
One of the primary challenges that influences the effectiveness of an EMR implementation is exchanging patient information between various and numerous healthcare applications. To add to the complexity, there are several standards available to use including:
- HL7
- HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)
- Continuity of Care Record (CCR)
- EHR-Lab Interoperability and Connectivity Specification (ELINCS)
Add to this the different EMR vendor data specifications, and it can become a real predicament to navigate the connectivity maze.
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| EMR-Connectivity-Strategy-Healthcare-Interoperability.pdf | 98.8 KB |
