At a panel discussion on electronic health records (EHR) and health information exchanges (HIE) held May 27 and sponsored by the Memphis Bioworks Business Association, one of the three panelists said the best way to drive EHR adoption by medical practices is to keep doctors focused on how it would help patients.

 

Rodney Holmes, executive director of the MidSouth eHealth Alliance which provides electronic medical record keeping for many Memphis healthcare entities, added that the incentives for adopting EHRs spur practices to use them, but not enough providers are using them yet to measure their success, such as their impact on healthcare costs.

 

Steven Burkett, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit UT Medical Group Inc., affiliated with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, said the electronic records are having an effect on healthcare costs, "but it's not proven. One problem is that the underlying economics of medicine affect EHR implementation."

 

Holmes said doctors and medical staff are reluctant to implement EHR technology because they believe it will interfere with the day-to-day medical practice.

 

Patients seem very open to their use, however, and not overly concerned with issues of privacy and security. Jeffrey Cunningham, chief technology officer of Nashville-based Informatics Corporation of America, a provider of EHR technology, said privacy is "an evolving issue."

 

"It's clear that HIPAA is not enough," he said, "but there is not a good understanding of security policies that should be in place. The question we have to answer is how do you balance consent of the patient with the need to provide care."

 

Holmes said this varies in different parts of the country, "but in the mid-South, every provider is responsible for notifying their patients" that their health records are being stored electronically.

 

Burkett said the patient opt-out rate is less than 1 percent, suggesting that most patients are comfortable with the privacy issues.

 

As for security, Holmes explained that every provider participant's data is stored separately in its own vault.

 

"It is very important to maintain separation of the data and to avoid intermingling of the data," he said.

 

Cunningham said EHRs will eventually prove convenient for patients as more providers adopt them.

 

"It will get to the point where wherever you travel, you'll be able to go into a hospital where they will be able to access your health records," he said.

 

However, Burkett said he believes most healthcare is delivered within 50 miles of wherever the patient lives, so national healthcare record access isn't needed.

 

As for how the current EHR framework in the mid-South compares to that of other regions or nationally, Cunningham said, "We are just laying the framework for the future. Economic incentives need to be improved ... so more practices will adapt."

 

Burkett added that while some incentives encourage the use of EMRs, others are in place that make it hard to use.