Health Care - Electronic Patient Records

I received a press release today from the National Governors Association in the US about the innovative strategies that many US States are using to achieve integrated health records. There could be some lessons for Canada in this as Electronic Health Records are key to reducing medical errors as well as reducing duplicate & triplicate tests. The brief came from the NGA Center for Best Practices.

Accelerating the Adoption of Electronic Prescribing examines electronic prescribing, or e-prescribing-the computer-based electronic generation and transmission of a prescription. E-prescribing improves patient safety and quality of care, increases prescribing accuracy and efficiency and reduces health care costs by making critical information available to health care providers. The use of e-prescribing will grow as states and others provide support for e-prescribing. In recent years, states annually have doubled the number of prescriptions sent electronically. If states stay the course, this rate of adoption will reach at least 50 percent by 2012, according to State Alliance for e-Health Call to Action for NGA.

Developing and implementing plans to promote e-prescribing can help governors achieve critical health reform goals: achieving higher quality care and enhancing the delivery of health care services. Several strategies are available to states to promote an e-prescribing agenda. These include:

* Developing e-prescribing policies;
* Incorporating e-prescribing into state publicly funded health programs; and
* Implementing financial incentive programs for e-prescribing.

This is very interesting development in the US. I recall a Rand Corporation study from 2005 that estimated the savings from EPR implementation in the USA in the billions of dollars. I will write more about this in the near future.

With the demographic trends and with health care making up close to 50% of provincial budgets, we must find all the efficiencies we can in the delivery of quality and accessible health care.