EHR Software With Artificial Intelligence Is The Next Big Thing

Electronic Health Records Software for extensive healthcare delivery networks today are often seen as firm, inflexible, difficult to use and costly to set-up. The most common of these EHR Software are often designed around older technologies, and it often shows in their ease of access. Many healthcare providers find these systems highly complex and hard to navigate, and it is very rare that an EHR System suits their specific needs.

As the healthcare delivery networks grow bigger country-wide, the challenge of making these systems help rather than hinder clinicians is increasing at a high rate. The options for improving this misalignment between systems and processes are limited although the goal is still attainable.

One is to design EHR systems to be more integrated and streamlined from the beginning. This would require an effective action on the part of the vendors but would prove to be helpful for the physicians.

Using an open-source EMR Software could be the second option. However, most current open-source systems aren’t easily scalable and often do not comply with HIPAA regulations, making this step unhelpful.

A last and more promising option is to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make existing EMR Software Systems more flexible and intelligent. AI capabilities for EHRs might be relatively narrow for now but we can surely expect them to improve at a fast rate.

Latest News on AI & EMR Software

The top Electronic Health Record (EHR) Software vendors during HIMSS18 indicated that incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into the EHR software is their next big goal and they have already started working on it.

The leading EHR software system vendors, Athenahealth, Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, Cerner and Epic in HIMSS18 revealed big plan for integrating artificial intelligence into healthcare workflows in the upcoming editions of their EHR platforms.

Girish Navani, CEO eClinicalWorks said that the company’s new Electronic Medical Records (EMR) software will include multiple panels for pop health, voice interactions and machine learning-based clinical decision support, telemedicine, all these on big Microsoft Surface Screen.

Those who visited Microsoft’s booth during the conference may have seen their Surface monitor displaying Epic’s EHR and Artificial Intelligence (AI) running with Microsoft Azure. Epic EMR Software system’s rival Allscripts EMR Software had also partnered with Microsoft in order to bring an Azure-powered top EMR software to HIMSS18 which their CEO, Paul Black defined as “bold, imaginative new EHR.”

Athenaclinicals, the EMR giant introduced Epocrates Connect, a virtual assistant that they automatically improve connectivity through smartphones. The company previously partnered with Noteswift to incorporate AI into their workflow in an attempt to make patient charting easier for the physicians. All the top EMR systems during the conference were focused on Artificial Intelligence and machine learning more than anything else.

In addition to the EMR software vendors, there were also many startups in HIMSS18 who gave glimpses of artificial intelligence. Neal Singh, Caradigm’s CEO took a bold tone regarding the future of AI and machine learning. He said, “If you think about AI, most vendors say they’re an AI company — but AI should be free,” Singh said. “We want AI to be a core capability, not a product. AI shouldn’t be a separate thing, it should be infused and embedded into workflows.”

The hospitals have to pay for Caradigm’s service or subscribe to eClinicalworks EMR Software’s cloud platform, but these two healthcare software vendors said that they will not charge extra for AI features and its other capabilities related to artificial intelligence.

The Takeaway

We can conclude by saying that what we saw during HIMSS18 was the first of the many steps taken to incorporate AI into EMR software solutions. It was just beginning to add these latest technologies to next-generation EHR solutions, imaging, and pop health platforms. Newer EHR Solutions have started incorporating the Internet of Things (IoT) in their operational workflows which could take this journey a step ahead.