I went to Kaiser a few months ago and had my ears checked. In les than 48 hours I was receiveing e emails advertising hearing aids. There have been other items as well that only made the connection looking back on them.
Further to my earlier comment about computerisation in the NHS - I received this in an email from my doctor this morning:
*"Here at the XXX Surgery we have now enhanced our Patient Access service to include access to your own personal medical record.
When logging into the service now you should see an option to view your medical record.
Not everything we hold on your medical record will be available online, but this enables you to see many important areas of information related to you.
This is the first step in enhancing the service so please look out for further notifications, either by email or follow us on twitter".*
I’m another IT guy in healthcare, and while I don’t handle the EMRs directly, I handle the infrastructure behind them. In our nonprofit enterprise, we have 3 organizations, which have 4 different EMRs. One for the hospital, one for our physician network, one for our vising nurse/hospice affiliate, and one for our oncology group inside the hospital.
Like mentioned above, we’re too small for Epic to talk to us, though my understanding is that they’d be able to handle all 4 groups in a single EMR. This would reduce cost no only in the number of support agreements, but also in the infrastructure costs, the development hours required for the systems to talk to each other and get the information across. Even when they can talk, they don’t do it particularly well.