Imagine it's 2020. You had a test done the day before, a test that was ordered because your physician was alerted via your EHR to a gap in care. The following morning, both you and your physician receive the results via e-mail, you via your PHR and she via her EHR system.
The test reveals an abnormality. You get another e-mail with a link to the EHR's patient portal to schedule an appointment with your physician. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Is this a pipe dream, or an ubiquitous scenario? If you're David Blumenthal, MD, the national coordinator for health IT, it will be commonplace. You can trace it back to February 2010 when Blumenthal proclaimed at the 18th National HIPAA Summit in Washington, D.C. that within the next 10 years there will be widespread use of EHRs across the country.
ARRA will be one of the enablers that make this all happen, but there are many other drivers, some that exist today and others that have not come to light yet - A new crop of physicians coming out of med school who are immersed in technology, associations and trade groups that support the transition, partnerships and demonstration projects between CMS and states, quality initiatives and pay-for-performance programs that require electronic data aggregation and reporting, and a vendor community ready to meet meaningful use criteria on a technology level, just to name a few. In between 2010 and 2020 is the hard work of addressing privacy and policy.
And there's still the issue of the cost of EHRs, though I suspect technology choices will bring the price tag down.
There is a lot of work to be done, and thanks to various committees and engaged stakeholders, we will get to that scenario, not just for some but for the majority. And in 2020, we'll look at each other and ask: What was all the fuss about?
