The Billionaire Who Controls Your Medical Records

Epic Systems founder Judy Faulkner built an empire pioneering—and later dominating—electronic medical records. For decades, she's kept them walled off from competitors, but now the pandemic is fueling a digital health care race that might finally topple her from the throne.

 The pandemic has spawned a new way to study medical records

It preserves confidentiality while liberating useful information.

A good idea gone bad…

Speak up. Make some noise. Get doctors off the white screen and back to the business of doctoring. Now that would be meaningful.

Doctors lack an analytic engine: Why we need EMR 3.0

Although research into their impact on quality of care and patient safety remains modest and is often controversial, these tools have eliminated considerable issues related to poor physician handwriting and have greatly improved internal and external provider communications and reporting.

Siri, Am I About to Have a Heart Attack?

Big data could provide early warning of disease—if medical records can learn to talk to one other.

Are Electronic Medical Records Ethical?

Since the mandated rollout with financial penalties for noncompliance began, EMR companies selling multiple platforms without input from busy practitioners on the front lines have flourished at the expense of the doctor-patient relationship.

Do electronic medical records improve quality of care?

We now have a critical mass of EMR users.1 We are at a tipping point and the positive effect will escalate with increased knowledge of how to use EMR systems in a meaningful way to their full potential, as well as improved system interoperability, with seamless exchange of information from one system to another.

Do Electronic Records Help or Hinder Patient Care?

The electronic medical record system has certainly added to the burden of caring for our patients, but it has also improved our ability to document a patient’s care. Before the implementation of electronic medical records, we struggled with deciphering handwritten and disorganized notes of our colleagues.

Electronic medical records – The good, the bad and the ugly

The chief complaint against EMR is that it has undermined personalized face-to-face patient care and the vital doctor-patient interaction - the very soul of medicine - into a new check box-based doctor-computer-patient interaction.

Electronic Medical Records: A Way to Jack up Billings, Put Patients in Control, or Both?

"Digital records are also being aggressively used to maximize patient billings," and other imperfections on the route to a more sensible health care system.

Electronic Medical Records: the Pros and Cons

So, if EMRs facilitate the delivery of health care why is it taking so long for the medical community to embrace EMRs?

EMR/EHR: The Good, The Bad & The Uncertain

The future of EMRs is uncertain, but one thing remains clear: we ultimately still want to pursue the “one patient, one record” ideal and in order to achieve that we might need to head back to the drawing board.

EMRs and Implantable Chips - The Future

Perhaps someday implantable chips will be so pervasive that a quick body scan will provide instantaneous medical information. Do we really want it?

How Electronic Medical Records Distract Nurses—and Harm Patients

Without doubt, electronic medical records are killing and injuring people, for some of the same reasons that airplanes crash.

If Doctors Don't Like Electronic Medical Records, Should We Care?

"Yes, there are problems in any technology implementation and there always will be. But fewer people die. Yes, it is important to connect with the patient. But fewer people die. Yes, the opportunity to pad billing is obscene. But fewer people die."

Is One Company About to Lock Up the Electronic Medical Records Market?

While Epic is meticulously working its way through the largest hospitals, the long tail of stand-alone ambulatory practices operate largely on a jumbled mess of EMRs, using many emerging vendors (such as AthenaHealth and PracticeFusion) with a multi-tenant model, similar to salesforce.com.

Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data

The monitoring and analysis of electronic medical records, some scientists say, have the potential to make every patient a participant in a vast, ongoing clinical trial, pinpointing treatments and side effects that would be hard to discern from anecdotal case reports or expensive clinical trials.

Primitive,' 'Asinine:' What Real Doctors Think of Electronic Medical Records

I believe that there are both good and bad aspects of EMRs, as they have the potential to both improve and worsen patient care. They are likely a step forward but also a work in progress, as there are perils lurking. The key for the health care profession is to continue moving forward by recognizing the vulnerabilities and remedying them, rather than ignoring them.

The Future of Medical Records

Electronic medical records are not working like they should -- or could -- according to a new analysis in Health Affairs that revisited previous predictions for the EMR revolution and found disappointing results, in terms of efficiency,saved costs, and patient care.

The Ups and Downs of Electronic Medical Records

The case for electronic medical records is compelling: They can make health care more efficient and less expensive, and improve the quality of care by making patients’ medical history easily accessible to all who treat them.

To Improve Treatments, Researchers Want To Hunt For Clues In Medical Records

When you go to your doctor's office, sometimes it seems the caregivers spend more time gathering data about you than treating you as a patient. Electronic medical records are everywhere – annoying to doctors and intrusive to patients. But now researchers are looking to see if they can plow through the vast amount of data that's gathered in those records, along with insurance billing information, to tease out the bits that could be useful in refining treatments and identifying new uses for drugs.

What’s the difference between EHR and EMR?

An electronic medical record (EMR) is a system that maintains the digital patient records of a single practice. Each digital patient record documents the medical and treatment history of a patient and replaces the paper charts clinicians used in the past. EMRs make it easy for clinicians to track clinical data over time, identify when a patient is due for preventative care, and monitor the overall quality of care within the practice. What EMRs don’t do is directly support the exchange of clinical data between healthcare organizations.

Why bad EMRs are forced on physicians

Sadly, the systems are very, very bad indeed. It is said that use of an EMR, versus paper charts or dictation, typically reduces physician productivity by about 30% right out of the box. It is also noted that now, young physicians in training spend more and more time at keyboards and less and less time looking at that pesky throwback to ancient times, the human patient. (How dare they not be pixelated!)

Can a Crowdsourced AI Medical Diagnosis App Outperform Your Doctor?

The Human Dx platform aims to improve the accuracy of individual physicians.

Doctors and Hospitals Need to Talk More. This App Can Help

Research as shown again and again that improved communication between physicians is critical to reducing medical errors.

How Mobile Apps Connect Physicians and Patients

It’s a brave new world for mobile apps in healthcare, with new possibilities emerging every day in areas such as patient empowerment and practice portability. Yet, according to Michael Nusbaum, MD, founder of mobile application MedXCom, one of the most beneficial aspects of mobile applications could very well be better communication between doctor and patient.

Is Your Doctor Listening?

We often criticize patients for how little they retain about their medical visit. But how much do doctors remember?

It's Your Right To See Your Medical Records. It Shouldn't Be This Hard To Do

At a time when many insurers and health information technology companies are busily assembling databases of hundreds of millions of medical records, Americans find it difficult to get access to their own.

The fax of life

Why American medicine still runs on fax machines.

Why America's medical records are stuck in the 18th century

Perhaps the most frustrating issue with electronic medical records right now is that they don't talk to each other; hospital A and hospital B typically have different records, made by different vendors, that can't share information. This means that even if hospital A and hospital B are across the street from each other, you still need to phone in or fax or print out any type of medical information you wish to share.

Your Health Care Information Is Insecure — And Extremely Lucrative On The Black Market

While cyberattacks on the health care industry may pose immediate health risks to patients, with consequences like hospitals closing and procedures needing to be rescheduled, the big concern must include data breaches, Cabrera said.