One of the federal goals of having providers implement EHRs is to better track, manage and improve population health, but a recently published report by the Department of Health and Human Services' d-quality-ahrq" target="_blank" class="directory-item-link">Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) finds that EHRs aren't equipped to complete those tasks.
The report, "Practice-Based Population Health: Information Technology to Support Transformation to Proactive Primary Care," notes that providers aren't performing all of the functionalities for population health, which would help enhance health promotion, preventative care and disease management.
Providers said that either they weren't able to find products with practice-based population health functionalities or those that existed in their EHRs didn't meet their expectations. Interestingly, providers aren't looking for these functionalities, so the report concluded that without market demand EHR vendors don't have incentive to develop them.
There are several external barriers to practice-based population health, but technological innovation is definitely something vendors can remedy in R&D. Given that tracking and improving population health is one of the meaningful uses of EHRs, the tipping point may be at hand. We may start to see vendors pay more attention to this area of clinical outcomes and include fields that would enable providers to gather relevant information that would more easily identify patients who need additional services.
Meaningful use criteria will no doubt drive what new capabilities EHRs will provide in the near future. Improving population health is critical if we are to drive down the cost of healthcare. Now that this common sense goal is part of meaningful use, providers will demand tools meet this requirement. The vendor market will comply. The federal program can score another victory in driving positive change.
Photo by Arenamontanus obtained via Creative Commons license.
