Driving from EHR to CHR...

We are just about getting a good road grip on EHR and now we have CHR almost ready to take us through to the next era on the Healthcare records and information.

What - Comprehensive Health Record (CHR) and Electronic Health Record (EHR). A Comprehensive Health Record is the broadening of the types of information offered in the traditional electronic health record. EHR is fact of the past and CHR can potentially become your future, with healthcare becoming more proactive!

Why - Currently, if you are visiting your local hospital for check ups, the data is limited to your physician and with the hospital. Similarly, if your medical insurance provider is X and next year you or your company shifts the provider to Y, then the data is again, remains with X.

Along side, there’s information that is not part of EHRs now, like genomics data. Next is patient care that happens outside of the hospital like behavioral data but its crucial enough to build the patient's life story or the big medical picture.

How - With Healthcare segment moving from fee-for-service to Value-based-care, the need to gather information about the patient becomes critical. This will help build patterns at a population level (PHM) providing better insights to the medical administration across.

With care coordination delivery models changing rapidly, healthcare data will increasingly consist of data from remote care delivery models that use data from smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The emergence of the IoT data, the unlocking of personal genomics data, and increasing focus to social determinant data are a few entirely new sources of data that are becoming equally important as EHR data. All latest digital health applications with superior user interfaces are becoming preferred platforms for the modern healthcare consumer.

The need of the hour is a fully connected and integrated healthcare experience delivered on-demand and in intuitive interfaces on all latest digital devices. Along with these developments, the nucleus for data management and new technology solutions has shifted away from on-premise hospital IT environments to stand-alone data lakes and cloud-based SaaS solutions.

We are seeing a digital revolution in the emergence of new sources of data, newer ways of data analyzing, and different technology landscapes and architectures that can chew and digest huge amounts of structured and unstructured data for meaningful patterns with patient-centric focus.

Who - So who will own the data? Will be the big EHR/CHR vendors or the vendors who store the vast data lakes. With the growing consumerism, its will be eventually expected that the user will raise the hand to claim the complete ownership of the data. Until then the subsets of these data will have to be shared in a way that can bring value to the patient and efficiency with respect to cost and operations to the providers and payers.

If everything goes fine with the adoption to CHR, the end user will be reaping the benefits as all his data will be visible in one single view!

Technology disruptions!