And although the partnership between patient and EHR plays a critical role in their success
, Shahid Shah, software analyst and author of the blog The Healthcare IT Guy, believes EHRs have a long way to go before they can take on the full responsibility of supporting these organizations.
"Today's reality of patient management is 'disjointed care,' and most of the collaborators in a patient's care team don't know what each other is doing for the patient in real time," he said.
Most EHRs, and even those that were built for meaningful use, said Shah, have traditionally done a bad job of understanding and designing "multi-entity" or "multi-tenant" database models, which encourage secure and trusted electronic collaboration between, for example, two hospitals or two clinics.
In the future, EHRs can't be seen as just applications, said Shah, but instead, as "broad care coordination platforms, [which] must allow dynamic business models that can accommodate a great deal of uncertainty and flexibility." When transitioning from supporting a set group of users in one organization, to supporting a multitude of user communities and relationships, "application architectures and data models must accommodate more fluid workflows," said Shah.
"The healthcare IT applications development community needs to lean that data modelling isn't just a technical exercise," said Shah.
Instead, he said, data modelling is about understanding all of the data's uses, and, not to mention, the relationships and attributes involved in the data.
Ref: Michelle McNickle, https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/5-keys-ehrs-supporting-next-generation-business-models
