The Electronic Health Record
If I were an electronic health record system I would be asking myself, “Why am I here? What am I doing? What is my purpose? I started out with the best of intentions. My goal was to make it easier to bill the insurance company and break out all the little nuances the doctor and the patient needed to come up with a plan. They designed me to get rid of all that paper and make life so much easier for everyone. How can I possibly have failed so miserably? Why am I the subject of hate mail in every healthcare blog from every doctor and patient in the known universe? Please make it stop!”
It has become clear over the past two years with the COVID pandemic that electronic health record systems have not simplified the delivery of healthcare. A case could be made that the creation of the electronic health record system was never meant to provide care for patients or support healthcare teams but rather to serve the health insurance industry and the business side of medicine.
It’s an unfortunate reality that most of us have had first-hand experience with this chaotic system as patients and as exhausted healthcare providers. So what is the solution to the existential crisis of the electronic health record system? Simply put -radical change. If there is one constant in this world, it is that everything changes, and the medical world is no exception. It is time for medical professionals to insist on this needed change and build new systems that engage the full scope of technology to meet the needs of our patients, and ourselves.
Radical Change
To usher in this change, leaders within healthcare need to step outside of their clinical mindset and into the promising world of information technology. How can we expect insurance administrators and software developers without any clinical experience to build systems that successfully replicate our organic clinical workflows? How can we sanely expect someone to build a system that supports individualized treatment for preventive planning and disease management with no knowledge of the daily process? This isn’t to say that systems can’t be built without a clinically trained information technologist, they can, and they have been, but not without consequences. Consequences felt by patients and healthcare teams, waiting on hold, for IT support.
Community Care
Much of the effort to usher in the new age of technology within medicine has been focused on large institutions and hospital care. Why has most of our time and technological investment focused on these larger medical institutions? It’s the age-old story of technology following the money. But optimal patient care exists far beyond the limits of hospitals, in homes, clinics and community centers. We are investing in a model that is focused on late-stage disease interventions with predictably poorer patient outcomes. Let’s begin investing more of our time, innovation and money into creating systems that promote a thriving patient care environment outside of these larger hospital systems.
The First Interpretive Health Record
Eva Health has focused the past twenty years on the creation of accessible, connected, user-friendly, technologically advanced healthcare systems that support patient and provider success at the independent practice level. Eva Health’s products include Eva Core, EVA Rx, and Eva Platform. Together they constitute Eva, the first Interpretive Health Record (IHR). Eva uses cloud-based software to compress EMR time by as much as 75%. Eva Core presents an electronic questionnaire to interview patients through personal devices or in their provider’s office. The dynamic Eva Core questionnaire generates the “core” of the medical record. Rules-based algorithms apply artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret the questionnaire data to present a preliminary document to the patient and provider in the patient chart and portal. Eva Core lives within the Eva Platform which expertly performs all of practice operations:
- Patient Intake
- Patient Check In
- Charting
- Lab Integration
- Billing
- Medical Coding
- Memberships
- Patient Check Out
- Practice Management
- Inventory Management
- Purchase Orders
- Patient Communications
- Marketing
- E-prescribing
- Custom Drug Compound Prescribing
- Patient Portal
Eva is the first Interpretive Health Record System that utilizes cloud-based software, rules-based algorithms and AI, all of which were created over the past 20 years by providers, healthcare teams and developers with the goal of improving the practice of medicine by simplifying workflow. We at Eva Health are excited to commit to out-patient clinics across the country and build a better system of care from a patient-centered approach.
