The Role of Electronic Health Records in Preventing Chronic Disease
Chronic diseases are a tremendous burden to both patients and the health care system. In 2014, 60% of adult Indians had at least one chronic disease or condition, and 42% had multiple illnesses. Chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and chronic kidney disease, are the leading causes of poor health, long-term disability, and death in the United States. One-third of all deaths in this country are attributable to heart disease or stroke, and every year, more than 1.7 million people receive a diagnosis of cancer. During the past several decades, the prevalence of diabetes increased dramatically; in 2015 more than 29 million Indians had diabetes and another 86 a million adults had prediabetes, increasing their chance of developing type 2 diabetes. Diabetes increases the risk of developing other chronic diseases, including heart disease, stroke, and hypertension, and is the leading cause of end-stage renal failure.
India has always been a land of wealth, culture, history, population, and now diseases. In the past 10 years, India has become the third country in the world with the greatest number of cancer patients. Over 20% of the country’s population suffers from at least one of the non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which are estimated to cost India $6.2 trillion during the period 2012–2030, according to a report. As per the World Health Organization (WHO), non-communicable diseases or chronic diseases, such as cancer, heart ailments, respiratory diseases, and diabetes, kill 38 million people globally every year.
It is rather sad that today, most of us either know someone or know of someone who suffers from one or more chronic diseases like diabetes or hypertension or cancer, or other stress-induced reproductive health complications. According to studies of Mortality rate, four in 10 people in India are dying from chronic diseases like diabetes or hypertension or cancer, or other stress-induced reproductive health complications.
The effect of this chronic disease is not only on the health of a person but also financially. On average, people who are suffering from chronic diseases are spending 1/5th of their salary on health care. Apart from people who are affected by chronic diseases, around 10% — 15% of people expected to be preconditioned for chronic diseases.
Clinical preventive strategies are available for many chronic diseases; these strategies include intervening before disease occurs (primary prevention), detecting and treating the disease at an early stage (secondary prevention), and managing disease to slow or stop its progression (tertiary prevention). These interventions, combined with lifestyle changes, can substantially reduce the incidence of chronic disease and the disability and death associated with chronic disease. However, clinical preventive services are substantially underutilized despite the human and economic burden of chronic diseases, the availability of evidence-based tools to prevent or improve them, and the effectiveness of prevention strategies. The biggest problem for improving the health condition of people and tackling chronic diseases is a lack of data which helps in identifying trends and understanding reasons for these diseases. Apart from that, the current health care system is designed to treat people after symptoms are shown with a person. We need a system that helps people identifying these symptoms and help people preventing preconditioned chronic diseases and guide them for healthier living.
The Role of Electronic Health Records in providing preventive Health care
With the current system of physical file folders, you could easily have health records spread across several doctor’s offices. If you were to move to a new office, files would need to copy and sent or faxed to your new doctor to give them a full picture of your health. You can easily see how many potential problems could come up with this: a patient not remembering their previous office’s contact information, lost or partial records, hard-to-read handwriting — the list goes on and on. With electronic health records (EHRs), patients’ health information is available in one place, when and where it is needed, to help you manage your patients’ care and improve efficiency.
An Electronic Health Record (EHR) is an electronic version of a patient’s medical history, that is maintained by the provider over time, and may include all of the key administrative clinical data relevant to that persons care under a particular provider, including demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory data, and radiology reports. The EHR automates access to information and has the potential to streamline the clinician’s workflow. The EHR also has the ability to support other care-related activities directly or indirectly through various interfaces, including evidence-based decision support, quality management, and outcomes reporting. But what makes EHR systems so powerful? How can they contribute to the overall productivity in the field of medicine?
6 ways EHR changes healthcare
There are many ways EHR is helping healthcare to advance, but some solutions already proved to be very important for the functioning of the medical staff. We made a list of the five most important improvements here:
1) Speed and productivity
The first way digital health records are influencing the healthcare industry is obvious: they help the system become better and more productive. Medical staff no longer has to write things down. Instead, all entries are just a few clicks away, so the whole process becomes faster than ever before. This gives doctors and nurses more time to do what they are trained to do — help patients to get better.
2) Improved treatment
The second way EHR is changing medicine is probably the most important. Namely, patients get an enhanced treatment due to the precision and transparency of medical records. For instance, a doctor can instantly see previous health problems of a patient and determine whether this person is allergic to certain drugs or substances.
This feature is fundamental in cases where patients don’t know or cannot respond to the doctor’s inquiries. Needless to say, such technology makes life much simpler for all those ER practitioners who don’t have time to think twice or interpret medical records.
3) Remote treatments
A lot of doctors, young ones, in particular, are using smartphones and health apps to help patients on the go. Such tools are easily paired with EHR to form a powerful connection that allows medical staff to operate remotely. That way, doctors can follow the condition of their patients and keep in touch with them despite being far away from each other.
4) Public health protection
EHR is not only helping individual patients but also improving public health as a whole. Since the system is unified and centralized, it is able to monitor information from different regions and databases. With a little help from Artificial Intelligence, EHR can determine common patterns and identify illnesses of widespread proportions before the actual outburst even occurs.
5) Changing skillsets
Learning how to use EHR is not exactly nuclear physics, but it does require a certain level of technical skills. This is why medical practitioners will have to get acquainted with IT equipment very soon. Nurses are the first to embrace the new skill set because they mostly have to enter patients’ personal and health-related information
6) Data-Driven Preventive Health care
AI is poised to make transformative and disruptive advances in health care.
With Artificial Intelligence and Electronic records, we can build a powerful system that can help normal users to understand their health informatics and take a precautionary step in improving His/her health sitting at home. This powerful system can act as a personal assistant in transforming personal health care into a data-driven preventive health care system that helps people to take preventive action on their health.
Summary:
Effective EHR use can improve care coordination, streamline daily clinical processes, and save hospitals money. Clinical decision support (CDS) tools built into EHR technology can also be useful in boosting screening rates and improving chronic care management. Most of the Chronic diseases can be prevented with the right care. With help of Electronic Health Records integrated into our day-to-day life, we can pro-actively understand our health informatics and take the right decision at right time. EHR use can enable more accurate, timely patient care to positively impact patient health outcomes and chronic disease management in a variety of populations.
Reference:
1) https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2019/18_0625.htm
2) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729795
