A new study published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN) points to improved care for patients with mild to moderate chronic kidney disease when their healthcare information is aggregated in a registry.
EHRs can help establish a national surveillance system to identify and manage various aspects of chronic kidney disease.
Such a reporting system already exists to track patients with advanced kidney disease and has led to improvements in the quality of care for these patients. Imagine the clinical and financial impact if the industry can track patients who are in the early stages of chronic kidney disease. If we can impact those patients at that time, in theory the cost of treatment, which becomes more expensive as the disease progresses, would go down.
As more and more hospitals, health systems and physician groups deploy EHRs and EMRs, the industry will have a great opportunity to create more national reporting systems on more diseases. With more patient data to turn into meaningful and actionable information, we will have the ability to track all stages of diseases, and potentially prevent diseases and help at-risk patients manage their conditions so that they their diseases don’t advance to the next level.
This is the potential power of EHRs - to be able to automatically track and report patient data for population health improvement and lowered healthcare costs for all.
Photo by zigazou76 via Creative Commons license.
