AMIA Develops Vision Of The EHR Of The Future

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) is developing its own vision for the EHR of the future, and they’re listening to the people who know best.

At its annual conference, the association listened to ideas from its membership, specifically from the EHR-2020 task force, and their ideas of what electronic records should look like six years from now. Formal recommendations are expected from AMIA before the end of winter.

The Task Force

The task force was created with the stated goal “to assure EHRs fit well into evolving workflow of healthcare delivery, support team-based care, enhance productivity and safety, and are as easy as possible to adopt” as well as highlighting areas where AMIA and their members might have an opportunity to take action on their recommendations.

The task force came up with a preliminary framework that generally covered topics including:

• simplifying and speeding documentation
• refocusing regulation
• increasing transparency
• fostering innovation

Panel member, Dr. Sarah Corley, who serves as chief medical officer of NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, stated that the task force was working to inform policy, vendors, and payers on the perspectives of experienced EHR users. She also suggested that ONC “back off” on creating functioning requirements around EHR certification. Corley also serves as vice-chair of the HIMSS EHR Association, and the opinion has been gaining popularity.

Preparing For Stage 3 MU

The task force’s work comes just as the federal government is preparing to write the rules for Meaningful Use Stage 3. With the prospect of Stage 3 though, the problems of Stage 2, and the providers who are still struggling to catch up, are apparently being heard. This has prompted ONC to make efforts to “think past the MU program.”

This sentiment was uttered by Erica Galvez, interoperability and exchange portfolio manager at ONC during the conference. Galvez also made reference to the 10 year interoperability roadmap that ONC has been working on and encouraged attendees to look at it not as a “final product,” but as “a starting point,” according to Health IT Outcomes.

Additional criticisms of the state of current EHR include a need for universal standards, overly ambitious MU requirements, and too much of a focus on structured data (vs. narrative text) from the physician side.