Another Example Of EMR “Golden Age” Applications

Not long ago, John posted a piece about the “Golden Age of EMRs Being Over” and how that’s playing out from an EMR vendor perspective. Since writing that piece he’s found that while the Golden Age of EMR buyer frenzy has passed, we’re entering a new EMR Golden Age which will feature amazing applications for clinicians and public health administrators. John calls these applications Smart EMR.

Today, I came across some news which I think is a perfect example of the kind of innovative applications John is predicting will emerge as EMRs mature. At the University of Notre Dame, researchers have developed a system which uses collaborative filtering of EMR records to better guide treatment, manage disease and predict disease risks across a population.

Notre Dame computer science associate professor Nitesh Chawla and doctoral student Darcy Davis call the new system the Collaborative Assessment and Recommendation Engine (CARE). CARE uses collaborative filtering to detect similarities between patients and produce personalized disease risk profiles for individuals. It does so by looking at diseases in similar patients.

“In its most conservative use, the CARE rankings can provide reminders for conditions that busy doctors may have overlooked,” Chawla said in a prepared statement. “Utilized to its full potential, CARE can be used to explore broader disease histories, suggest previously unconsidered concerns and facilitate discussion about early testing and prevention, as well as wellness strategies that may ring a more familiar bell with an individual and are essentially doable.”

Ultimately, Chawla says, such a system can produce a host of benefits. For example, he suggests, it can reduce readmission rates, improve quality of care ratings, help demonstrate Meaningful Use and improve personal and population health. On a more micro level, it can allow patients to walk out of their doctor’s office with a list of recommendations based on predicted health risks, he notes.

This is just one example of the kind of new applications that are emerging as EMRs mature and the use of big data becomes a tool for wellness. I expect to see lots of announcements of this kind over the next year or two. It’s an exciting time.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

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