Have you ever gone to see a specialist, only to end up as the courier between your primary care doctor and referring physician?
What if emergency room doctors had immediate access to your medical history to provide tailored care quickly? Cloud-based medical software has the potential to resolve scenarios like these and transform patient care in the process.
Cloud-based medical records involve storing patients’ health information securely online. This creates one centralized, easily shareable resource accessible to members of a care team—with the appropriate permissions.
Transitioning medical records to the cloud comes with many practical perks in day-to-day medical practice:
- Speedier access to patient data for urgent decision-making
- Smoother transfer of information between healthcare providers
- Patients can securely access their records anytime, anywhere
The Potential to Prevent Medical Errors
Let’s start with a staggering figure: over 250,000 deaths per year in the U.S. stem from medical errors. It ranks among the leading causes of death, higher than accidents, lung disease, or diabetes.
A lack of coordination and incomplete information lie at the heart of many life-threatening mistakes.
- For example, drug interactions account for thousands of preventable hospital admissions each year. Without holistic records, harmful interactions slip through the cracks.
- Or take patient misidentification during medical exams, still common. Results tagged to the wrong profile have led to everything from cancelled surgeries to deadly overdoses.
Centralized e-health records don’t serve as panacea. But they should massively shrink the margin for information-based errors.
The Benefits of Connected Cloud Systems
- Prescribers have instant access to the full medication lists and histories of their patients before writing scripts. They can double-check for problematic drug combinations via automated warnings.
- Unique patient identifiers enable more failsafe ID checks before procedures.
- Automatic tracking of treatment and prescription schedules across locations minimizes the risk of anything slipping through gaps in care.
While doctors are far from infallible, cloud networking makes it easier to catch mistakes before damage is done.
Enhanced Care Coordination Between Providers
Under traditional systems, records remain siloed in the various clinics, hospitals, or offices that patients visit. Pertinent health details often fail to make it to the right physicians at the right time.
Without the full picture, doctors face challenges like:
- Prescribing treatments that exacerbate underlying conditions or interact with other medications.
- Ordering redundant or unnecessary tests due to missing information.
- Misdiagnoses because symptoms mask or mimic other illnesses.
Again, centralized e-records allow authorized providers to collaborate seamlessly, no matter their geographic proximity.
Specialists can review full histories, general practitioners oversee total care regimens, and ER doctors access emergency contacts, allergies, and more on the spot.
Empowered Patients & Improved Outcomes
Imagine access extends to patients themselves—to view, download, supplement, and share their health data as needed.
Enabled patients coordinate their own care teams. They switch doctors or seek second opinions without reinventing the wheel each time. Ongoing conditions become easier to self-manage through tracking engagement.
Opening two-way communication also streamlines administrative tasks in healthcare offices. Patients can self-report updates to their records or submit intake forms electronically from home before appointments.
Dynamic health records even pave the way for advanced trend analysis over time. Identifying correlations between lifestyle factors, biomarkers, genetics, treatments, and health outcomes gets more feasible.
In the future, AI-powered early diagnosis or risk warnings could emerge. The benefits branch out as tech capacities expand.
Evaluating Vendors: Security, UX & Interoperability
While potential advantages are compelling, realizing such ambitions requires picking partners strategically. When assessing solutions:
- Prioritize security & compliance: Encrypted cloud platforms that meet HIPAA standards for data integrity and patient privacy are non-negotiable.
- Demand EHR interoperability: Can the provider achieve flexible integrations with diverse existing systems? Avoid locking data into proprietary siloes.
- Examine UI/UX: Will the interface facilitate user-friendly access without overly technical tools? Poor design hampers adoption.
- Scale affordably: Can system capabilities expand cost-effectively as needs evolve over time? Plan for long-term partnerships.
