Electronic health records could help care providers avoid the growing public health crisis of healthcare-related illnesses, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Thomas Frieden.
CMIO Magazine reports that Frieden said in a webinar that EHRs may allow both patients and providers to track chronic illness and comorbidities, which may lead to better outcomes and fewer errors.
He said that healthcare-related illnesses cause 100,000 deaths per year, and that this costs the healthcare system up to $30 billion. However, as many as one third of these conditions could be easily avoided.
"Coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertensive disease, heart failure and other causes are major drivers of the unaffordable healthcare inflation that we are living through," said Frieden, according to the news source. "Public health interventions can make a big difference."
He added that broader adoption of EHRs could help the agency realize some of its broader goals, such as greater use of aspirin, blood pressure and cholesterol control and smoking cessation. All of these things could help reduce the burden of chronic diseases.
The points raised by Frieden in his webinar are indicative of the broader industry's feelings toward EHRs. Many believe that the technology has the power to transform the care of chronically ill patients. By connecting physicians to the most up to date information, electronic records could enable medical professionals to deliver the highest quality care while reducing costs.
A study published in a recently issue of the journal Medical Care confirmed some of these theorized benefits.
For the study, researchers fitted the computers of a group of 40 primary care physicians at Northwestern Medical Center with a yellow light that would alert to potentially dangerous changes in their patients' conditions.
As a result of using this system, the researchers observed an increase in the number of heart disease patients who received cholesterol-lowering medications, the patients given pneumonia vaccinations and the percentage of patients who had a colon cancer screening. All of these procedures may lower the risk of chronic disease significantly.
"It helps us find needles in the haystack and focus on patients who really have outstanding needs that may have slipped between the cracks," said lead author Stephen Persell, who led the study. "Quality health care is not just about having good doctors and nurses taking care of you. It's having systems in place that make it easier for them to do their jobs."