Nathan Hutchinson
Regional Sales Director
Nathan Hutchinson Regional Sales Director
Patient-Focused Care and the Increasingly Mobile “Life” Health Record
The idea of “Continuity of Patient Care” is extending further past the four walls of the hospital, past the physician office or clinic, into the patient’s home and beyond. Patients can access advanced care and testing in a growing number of diverse settings, including freestanding urgent care, emergency rooms and more recently even in pharmacies. People are more mobile than ever. Our collective efforts should work towards ensuring our individual health record story is just as mobile, as well as accurate and complete. Simple, right? Maybe not so much, but it’s getting there.
I believe that technology today is capable of reducing healthcare information “silos,” but other drivers and motivators (or disincentives) come into play when data-sharing initiatives, data ownership and data privacy topics are on the table. How do we maintain accuracy and derive appropriate value from the aggregate healthcare data being collected along each step of our healthcare journey, while maintaining our rights to privacy and control of our own personal health story?
The healthcare informatics industry continues to evolve and extend beyond the hospital, driven by the need to aggregate diverse data from more sources and provide greater transparency and accessibility to patients and their providers. Similarly, advanced medical devices like our Cardea SOLO ECG System can significantly increase intrinsic value when capable of safely and securely communicating rich data sets that can improve both individual and future collective healthcare decision-making and treatment. This is no longer an option, but a requirement.
This can only be achieved if we all work together in supporting interoperability and data exchange initiatives, ensuring patient data, in all its rich context, is accessible as a priority to the healthcare providers who are entrusted to care for us. I am proud that Cardiac Insight has worked to provide robust data communications capabilities for our products. This will ensure that our healthcare providers and their patients can make the best clinical decisions wherever they are located. Great medical device data communications capabilities can also help to contribute to the body of healthcare research, given appropriate permissions.
We should all be looking for ways to provide ease of access to, and integrity of healthcare data that enables a “single source of truth” for future reference or need. We all need help creating and sharing our mobile “life” health record.
