The US Department of Veterans Affairs has decided to crack open its EMR, allowing scientists to query de-identified patient information in the hopes of improving care for conditions ranging from posttraumatic stress disorder to MRSA, cancer, and heart failure.
Matthew Samore, a physician-epidemiologist from the VA Salt Lake City who will be involved with the project, held out hope the so-called Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research "will not only inform new guidelines but help resolve some conflicts in current guidelines.
The VA Medical System is among the largest in the nation. Only VA-associated scientists will be granted access to the gold mine, but everyone will benefit once they publish their findings.
Samore told AMedNews he hoped the VA project would demonstrate how data-mining techniques could be applied in other systems, while positing that since most health providers cannot share data with each other, it would be years before most systems could match what the VA could do today.
Pam Matthews, a senior director of health care information systems at HIMSS echoed this assessment. “The VA is a closed system. When you apply (what they are doing) to the commercially available products, their data model, their software model may be different," she told AMedNews.
Samore then mentioned something about Health Information Exchanges, a work-around solution that evolved along with the legacy client-server EMR systems used in many hospitals.
Web-based technology, such as that used by Practice Fusion, eliminates health data exchange problems by securely storing patient medical records in a central location. This data is always available to every health professional that needs it, simply by accessing a secure location on the Web.
Centrally located data obviates the need to define, communicate and implement technologies necessary to exchange data between legacy client-server systems. It is safe, secure and HIPAA compliant.
The VA begins its project under a cloud of scrutiny caused by its failure to protect patient privacy in a number of instances, including the heist of a laptop containing data on 26 million vets. This kind of thing would never happen with a Web-based solution, since the data are stored off-site.
Glenn Laffel, MD, PhD, Sr. VP Clinical Affairs; Matthew Douglass, VP Engineering
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1 comments:
an EMR system tracks a patient’s entire health and medical history in a computerized, electronic format that is accessible wherever the patient is. These records are more easily retrievable than manual systems, and can make a patient’s navigation through the health care system much safer and more efficient.
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