WASHINGTON – Studies appearing last week in a special edition of Health Affairs show that electronic health records advance medical progress and aid doctors’ decision-making in real time.
At a Jan. 26 briefing sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, experts and federal officials promoted the potential of a national deidentified patient database for advancing evidence-based medicine.
Carolyn Clancy, M.D., director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality said America’s healthcare system could be transformed when doctors are able to engage in rapid learning provided by real-time healthcare information.
“Health information technology is about making the right thing to do, the easy thing to do,” Clancy said.
“On the broadest level, [healthcare IT] has the potential to be a kind of information ‛nervous system,’ enabling us to learn directly from the health delivery system itself,” Clancy said. “The richest possible source about what really works in healthcare is the everyday experience of healthcare delivery and the results for patients.”
Lynn Etheredge, a researcher at the RWJF-funded Rapid Learning Project, George Washington University, said the Project has shown that through rapid learning, doctors are better able to advise their patients on cancer and diabetes care.
“Right now, physicians are trying to use an inadequate evidence base built on a patchwork of small sample studies and proprietary databases to determine how to treat patients,” Etheredge said. “Often, existing studies don’t pertain to the typical patient who walks into their offices.”
Etheredge urged the development of a federal healthcare IT system that can automatically report the best uses of new technologies, drugs and procedures as they are developed. “Currently, there is no system for evaluating new procedures and they represent a much larger portion of annual healthcare costs than do drugs,” Etheredge said.
