Within five years, you will use an on-line health record. With the online record, you will schedule appointments, trade messages with your doctor and get prescription refills.
And that’s just the beginning. Having a robust, integrated on-line health record will cause more change in healthcare than any other single development in the past 50 years. It will open the door for widespread use of mobile health apps, telemedicine, and developments that we can’t even imagine yet.
Making this sea of change happen is a counterculture software company, called Epic, that most people outside of healthcare have never heard of. The change that Apple’s products started in the recording and publishing industries, Epic’s myChart will start in healthcare.
Sure, there are other personalized electronic health records (EHRs) now. But, what currently stands for a personalized EHR has made very little impact in how care is delivered.
For there to be real change, an EHR needs to connect the information from everywhere you get care. Also, doctors need to embrace using this on-line tool as a way to interact with patients.
The reason that personalized EHRs haven’t caught on yet is that users have to input most of the data (think of Quicken in its early days) and most doctors are understandably worried that too many of their patients will want to become on-line pen pals.
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