#AHIMA11 these people talking about a genomics-based #EHR are blowing my mind…storage vendors must love the concept…lawyers, too

— Don Fluckinger (@DonFluckinger) October 4, 2011

This is a pretty old tweet that I’d stored away, but I’m completely interested in the idea of a Genomics based EHR. I meant to reach out to Don Fluckinger to see what he was talking about. I don’t think that there is any EHR that is based on Genomics. Although, if there is I’d love to know about it. Instead, I’m pretty sure that Don is just talking about integrating Genomics into EHR software.

I’ve made this prediction for a number of years now: Genomics will be part of the EHR software of the future. Genomics is one of the core elements that I think a “Smart EMR” will be required to have in the future. I really feel that the future of patient care will require some sort of interaction with genomic data and that will only be able to be done with a computer and likely an EHR. I love some of the quotes by Shahid Shah in this eWeek article about Digital Biology and Digital Chemistry.

As I think about genomics interacting with EHR data and the benefits that could provide healthcare going forward, I realize that at some point doctors won’t have any choice but to adopt an EHR software. It will eventually be like a doctor saying they don’t want to use a blood pressure cuff since they don’t like technology.

The following is an expert from the press release by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) about EMR data:

Hundreds of billions of gigabytes of health information are now being collected in electronic medical records, and three-quarters (76%) of more than 700 healthcare executives recently surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP agree that the secondary use of this information will be their organization’s greatest asset over the next five years. The data that could be mined from the health system can improve patient care, predict public health trends and reduce healthcare costs, but PricewaterhouseCoopers finds lack of standards, privacy concerns and technology limitations are holding back progress.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the healthcare industry won’t see the full value of investments in electronic medical records and other health IT investments until it finds secondary uses for the information being gathered. Yet 90 percent of executives surveyed feel the industry needs better guidelines about how health information can be used and shared, and 76 percent feel that national stewardship over, or responsibility for, the use of the health data should be regulated.

In its newly published report “Transforming Healthcare through Secondary Use of Health Data,” PricewaterhouseCoopers calls for public-private collaboration and a role for government in creating incentives for the private sector to collect, share and use health data; to establish standards; and to redefine technical architecture to allow interoperability.