Universal Electronic Health Record: Just what the doctor ordered

Abstract

AbstractThe time has come for health informatics to unify; this call for integration will help in better patient care across various systems spread globally. This feat requires standardization of health related information. The implementation of Electronic Health Record (EHR) is such standard which will facilitate collaboration of disparate systems. This emerging standard proposes to digitally accumulate patient's entire healthcare information and allow real time effortless exchange between different care providing sites or individuals. This will result in non redundant patient data accessibility (Any time, any where, any device) resulting in improved efficiency and quality of patient care. The realization of this effort requires different standards organizations like Health Level 7 (HL7), Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) and European Committee for Standardization (CEN) to collaborate and produce standards that are interoperable between different organizations. This collaborated effort will result as building blocks for foundation of neural health care network. This state of the art health informatics grid has to overcome barriers in technical implementation, health care domain, globalization, and education and training before realisation of the dream to have an integrated EHR.