A Case for Interconnectivity in Healthcare

On any given day, patient are seeking out healthcare in various settings and from various caregivers. Our patients are increasingly complex. As people live longer with multiple medical conditions, managing their care is becoming increasingly challenging.  Managing complex patients requires greater clinician effort and increased health care resources.

The risk of adverse drug reactions is increased secondary to the number of medications they are on. In the November issue of JAMA, Shehab and colleagues report that the incidence of emergency department visits adverse drug reactions remains high. Such reactions continue to result in adverse patient outcomes and burden on the healthcare system. Based on data from 58 ED’s from 2013 and 2014, they identified 42,585 adverse drug reactions or 4 ED visits for adverse drug events per 1000 individuals

Among children (aged ≤5 years), antibiotics were most commonly implicated; among older children and adolescents (aged 6-19 years), antibiotics were most commonly implicated, followed by antipsychotics; and among older adults (aged ≥65 years), anticoagulants, diabetes agents, and opioid analgesics were implicated in approximately 60% of ED visits for adverse drug events.

Patients often see multiple providers who prescribe medications. Some of these patients even fill their prescriptions at different pharmacies or even online. Each provider documents in their electronic medical record. The difficulty is that often this data is not shared across platforms. The result is often the medication errors and adverse outcomes. Interconnectivity and integration of medications across platforms is a necessary and relatively easy step toward interconnectivity and health information exchanges.