WASHINGTON – Electronic health records will become the norm, sooner than later, experts said at a summit hosted Friday by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).
The bottom line, said many of the speakers at ONC's Grantee and Stakeholder Summit, is that consumers are demanding EHRs. The government is helping with adoption, but this is not nearly as influential as the healthcare consumer's pressure on providers.
National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD, said the patient is not just "a ticket holder crammed into economy."
"The patient is the copilot" with his or her healthcare provider, Mostashari said. "Increasingly, we'll hear patients, consumers, people expecting more out of their interactions with others. So we're going to see all of the pieces come together for this."
In a keynote speech, Jay Walker, curator for the TEDMED Conference, a forum for healthcare innovation, said "tech speed" is the world we live in. "Med speed" is much slower. Too slow, in fact, for consumer's liking, he said.
In a quick survey of the audience of 1,200 people, Walker asked who does not possess a smart card. Only fifteen people raised their hands. Walker pointed out that would not have been true five years ago. Smart cards are a new phenomenon, and part of the exponentially changing world consumers live in. Paper maps, phone books and rolodexes are now all obsolete. "The consumer is driving all of the change," he said.
"Suddenly the patients are in charge of the future, instead of the healthcare system," Walker added. "You are at the front line when you walk into a doctor's office and say, 'it's time for electronic health records.'"
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