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Electronic Medical Records

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Increasingly, collections of medical records are stored and shared digitally by multiple medical service providers. RAND research has explored the costs of implementing electronic medical record systems; the benefits accrued, including the improved quality of care; the rate of technology adoption; individual privacy concerns; and the role of government in the use and growth of electronic recordkeeping.

Report

Patients Could Help Improve Record Matching

Aug 22, 2018

When health providers exchange medical records, the success rate can be as low as 50 percent. The ubiquity of mobile phones offers a promising opportunity to create a patient-empowered system to confirm identities that would allow hospitals and other providers to match records more accurately.
Report

Quality of Patient Care Drives Physician Satisfaction; Doctors Have Concerns About Electronic Health Records

Oct 9, 2013

Being able to provide high-quality health care is a primary driver of job satisfaction among physicians, and obstacles to quality patient care are a source of stress for them. For example, the systems for electronic health records in use today are cumbersome to operate and contribute to their dissatisfaction.

Explore Electronic Medical Records

Journal Article

Electronic Health Data Quality and Population Health Management Algorithms

In this perspective piece, we explore the implications of poor quality electronic health data on the use of population health management algorithms for patients, clinicians, and policymakers.

Aug 27, 2021
Journal Article

Assessment of Variation in Electronic Health Record Capabilities and Reported Clinical Quality Performance in Ambulatory Care Clinics, 2014–2017

Between 2014 and 2017, clinics with EHRs having greater capabilities had better quality measures than other clinics, but clinics that gained EHR capabilities during this time had smaller increases in quality that were not statistically significant.

May 4, 2021
Journal Article

Low-Value Proton Pump Inhibitor Prescriptions Among Older Adults at a Large Academic Health System

Older adults are particularly vulnerable to complications from proton pump inhibitor drugs. We sought to characterize the prevalence of potentially low-value PPI prescriptions among older adults to inform a quality improvement intervention.

Apr 9, 2021
Journal Article

Visualization of Electronic Health Record Data for Decision-Making in Diabetes and Congestive Heart Failure

The aim of this study is to study the impact of graphical representation of health record data on physician decision-making to inform the design of health information technology.

Dec 22, 2020
Journal Article

Health Information Technology for Ambulatory Care in Health Systems

The relatively low uptake of health IT functionalities important to care improvement suggests substantial opportunities for further improving adoption of ambulatory health IT even among the current EHR users.

Dec 18, 2020
Journal Article

Optimizing Health IT to Improve Health System Performance: A Work in Progress

We describe activities that health systems are pursuing to better leverage health IT to improve performance, in a qualitative thematic approach.

Dec 4, 2020
Journal Article

Common Laboratory Results Frequently Misunderstood by a Sample of Mechanical Turk Users

Use of Mechanical Turk to determine how well patients understand common laboratory test results.

Oct 2, 2020
Journal Article

Researching the Appropriateness of Care in the Complementary and Integrative Health Professions: Part 5: Selection, Protection, and Abstraction

Of the records abstracted, many revealed incomplete provider documentation regarding the details of and rationale for care. Better documentation and more standardized record keeping would facilitate future research using patient records.

Jun 11, 2020
Journal Article

Researching the Appropriateness of Care in the Complementary and Integrative Health Professions: Part 4: Putting Practice Back Into Evidence-based Practice by Recruiting Clinics and Patients

This study found that clinics can be successfully recruited for practice-based studies, and patients can be recruited using iPads. Obtaining patient records presents considerable challenges, and clinics varied in whether they had electronic files, nonelectronic records, or a mixture.

Jun 10, 2020
Report

Reuse of health data by the European pharmaceutical industry: Current practice and implications for the future

Health data is re-used for a variety of reasons by pharmaceutical companies across the R&D pathway. RAND Europe suggests seven ways which might help create a sustainable ecosystem in which health data is reused effectively.

Nov 12, 2019
Journal Article

Benchmarking Deployment of Ehealth Among General Practitioners: Executive Summary

A study measuring the use of ICT and eHealth applications by primary care physicians in the EU. Researchers analysed the main drivers of change and factors that can enhance or inhibit the role and use of technologies within health care.

May 30, 2019
Commentary

How Smartphone Apps Could Help Keep Health Records Accurate

Electronic health records have helped streamline record keeping but providers aren't always able to reliably pull together records for the same patient from different hospitals, clinics, and doctor's offices. The growing use of smartphones offers a promising opportunity to improve record matching.

Oct 4, 2018
News Release

Mobile Phones and Smartphone Apps Hold Promise for Allowing Patient Participation in Improving Medical Record Matching

Mobile phones and smartphone apps offer a promising approach to ensure that an individual's medical records when shared between different health care providers are matched correctly.

Aug 22, 2018
Report

Best Practices for Participant and Stakeholder Engagement in the All of Us Research Program

RAND researchers identified best practices for engaging participants in the All of Us Research Program, which collects long-term health data from 1 million U.S. adults. Engagement involves awareness, enrollment, and retention of program participants.

Aug 17, 2018
Journal Article

Electronic Health Record "Super-Users" and "Under-Users" in Ambulatory Care Practices

To achieve the broader benefits of electronic health records, health systems and policy makers need to identify and address barriers to full use of health IT functionalities.

May 18, 2018
Journal Article

Collaborative Targeted Learning Using Regression Shrinkage

While the underlying theory of collaborative targeted minimum loss-based estimation is quite general, current implementations involve greedy stepwise selection of covariates into the exposure model.

Dec 15, 2017
Journal Article

Core Components for a Clinically Integrated mHealth App for Asthma Symptom Monitoring

Smartphone-based health apps - using patient reported outcomes - can help asthma patients monitor symptoms between doctor visits.

Dec 15, 2017
Journal Article

Accounting for Misclassification in Electronic Health Records-derived Exposures Using Generalized Linear Finite Mixture Models

Exposures derived from EHRs may be misclassified, leading to biased estimates of their association with outcomes of interest: finite mixture models can correct biases with no loss of efficiency.

Dec 7, 2017
Journal Article

Using the Electronic Health Record to Understand and Minimize Overuse

Electronic health records represent a key opportunity to address overuse and the high costs of care and to realize benefit from one of the country's major health care investments.

Jul 19, 2017

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RAND Topic:
Electronic Medical Records

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