In today’s hypercompetitive healthcare environments, driving cost control is paramount and healthcare providers, payers and vendors must reduce cost while increasing the quality of care. Patient-centric technologies are at the core of the solution. These technologies necessitate clinical integration using health information exchanges and associated components. Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) was created to address this enterprise-centric view for all data types, not just medical imaging. HCR is a real time “active” repository that consolidates data from a variety of clinical sources to present a unified view of a single patient. It is optimized to allow clinicians to retrieve data for a single patient rather than identify a population of patients with common characteristics or facilitate the management of a specific clinical department.

Unfortunately, the care environment is littered with application-centric technologies like PACS and provider-centric technologies like EMRs. Neither of which delivers a patient-centric, portable view of the patient. The concept of the holistic electronic health record has been extenuated in recent moves toward personal health records. The use of clinical data mining in genetic records will change the outcomes of various disease states. Once healthcare providers gain access to comprehensive electronic patient records, the drive toward predictive, personalized medicine will be possible.

Here is an interesting article by Brian T. Horowitz of eWEEK, on the challenges cloud computing presents to the healthcare industry.

Will the role of VNAs in the healthcare of tomorrow be central or peripheral? The continued evolution of IT solutions is likely to be the catalyst propelling the VNA approach either into the limelight or the shadows.

What do you think?