When used right, EMRs can be very powerful. But I think most of us would agree that the endgame — the greatest level of benefit they can offer — will be when hospitals succeed at integrating EMRs with medical devices. A new study from CapSite suggests that hospital CIOs agree completely with this analysis.
The CapSite study, which surveyed more than 300 hospital leaders, found that 54 percent of U.S. hospitals plan to purchase new medical device integration solutions over the next 24 months. When asked why, 40 percent of hospitals said “quality improvements” were the primary reason for their planned investment.
Now, integration is a fairly broad term. I doubt we’re looking at a 24-month horizon for some of the following:
- In a May study by KLAS, more than half of 251 providers surveyed said that EMR connectivity will be a factor when they next invest in infusion pumps. But at present vanishingly few hospitals are actually implementing new smart pumps with wireless EMR connectivity.
- If you consider an iPad a “medical device,” it’s worth remembering that iPad-to-EMR integration is still dicey at best. Smartphones aren’t well integrated either, especially Android devices. And getting them in synch with EMRs is no trivial matter.
- At least one vendor — like the first of many — is offering a software solution which integrates data from wireless sensors on the patient’s body into a cloud-based, open-source EMR. This is a great idea, but still in its infancy.
All that being said, there’s definitely some integration which should take place more quickly. For example, integration of voice recognition technology with EMRs is moving at a fast clip. Doing this for dictation within an EMR is a no-brainer. The next level will to see how far speech and natural language understanding get in filling out more of the encounter data and (brace yourself) coding the visits for doctors.Though many of the more intriguing apps are still in their babyhood, it seems we’re on for seamlessly connected EMR-to-device experience in hospitals fairly soon.
