Cloud-Based EHR

Over the past decade, health systems and physician offices have made tremendous gains in shifting their medical record-keeping from paper to computerized systems. This shift to electronic health information and interoperability of this information, such as through the use of electronic health records (EHRs), has the potential to make care safer and more efficient and improve the patient care experience by providing timely access to health information and seamlessly coordinated care.

In an ideal state, patients’ information should automatically follow them to all of their healthcare providers, so that everyone on their care teams stays informed and provides the best treatment. Facilitating the electronic exchange of this health information is critical to easing the burden by ensuring that clinicians have the best information possible when making decisions about patient care.

An electronic health record (EHR) is a digital version of a patient’s paper chart. They are real-time, patient-centered records that make information available instantly and securely to authorized users. While an EHR does contain the medical and treatment histories of patients, an EHR system is built to go beyond standard clinical data collected in a provider’s office and can be inclusive of a broader view of a patient’s care. EHRs are a vital part of health IT and can:

1. Contain a patient’s medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images, and laboratory and test results.

2. Allow access to evidence-based tools that providers can use to make decisions about a patient’s care.

3. Automate and streamline provider workflow

4. Appropriate and timely sharing of patient information also allows clinicians to ensure patients receive timely care in the most appropriate setting by:

• Reducing duplicate testing.
• Avoiding medication errors.
• Avoiding readmissions.
• Improving decision-making.
• Enhancing care coordination

Developing an EHR-based solution requires understanding and following the data protection compliances such as the HIPAA(Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance as the data stored in these records is extremely sensitive and personal.

To implement such a solution that requires an ever-changing demand to store and maintain the data, the recommended approach would be to host the solution on AWS cloud as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security, and compatibility they need. 

Healthcare data migration is not as simple as transferring information between systems for other industries, where you often simply pull records from one source and insert them into another. Migrating data to a new electronic health record system requires expertise in the legacy EHR and the new one, as well as an emphasis on patient care.