Imagine that you are a clinical pharmacist (or any other type of health care provider) and are seeing a patient in a few days for a hospital follow-up. The patient has a myriad of health issues and spent many days as an inpatient at a major health system, like Michigan Medicine. So, like any reasonable health professional, you would want to see records of what was done during their stay so you can provide continuity of care when you meet with them. First, you call the hospital where they were admitted to and try to get connected to someone to obtain medical records. This can be a process as every hospital has different channels to get this information. Once you finally get a hold of someone that can help you, they finally are able to fax you what was done in the hospital. You go to the fax machine to find a stack of fifty pages of medical information. You spend the next few hours sorting through that information to pick out the pertinent information for your visit with this patient.

This process of obtaining medical records from another hospital system is a tedious, broken system. In a perfect world, all electronic health records (EHR) would be connected and one could easily request and get records electronically. This would substantially streamline the system and make it much more user friendly. One could pull out pertinent information without having to sift through many pages of paper documents. In addition to this, the use of paper records is extremely wasteful as much of the printed documents are discarded after use.

Much of this stems from how EHR is currently set up. EHRs are developed by competing companies, so there is no incentive for them to work together to make a seamless system: this would cut into their profits. EHR interoperability has been a major topic of discussion in both politics and in medicine, but no major strides have been made in allowing for its implementation. In addition, health insurances have no reason to share data with others, such as providers, which limits the amount of information available to help patients. I think that if EHRs had a better way to communicate with each other, healthcare costs would lessen and patient care as a whole would improve. With the fractured health system, this will continue to be a problem until EHR and insurance companies can work together or the government puts in place a new system for more overarching healthcare.