For more than a decade there has be...

For more than a decade there has been agreement in the United States that information technology is a critical part of any effort to achieve high performance health care for everyone The potential benefits of moving from followings of disconnected and episodic visits between patients and doctors to continuous connectivity are widely recognized to be of great value to patients, families, communities, investigators, payers and purchasers, employee health organizations, and physicians. (1)

A replete quarter of a century ago, a uniform ambulatory medical care minimum basic data fix was designed and reported to the United States National Committee upon Vital and Health Statistics. (2) As the 21st hundred began, the Institute of Medicine articulated notwithstanding again the enormous potential for information technology to improve health care quality from enabling safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable care. (3) The Institute acknowledged that the health care rule will move away from the general medical record (an artifact of visits) to health care information that is interactive, real-time, and prospective. The potential contrasts starkly with what has been achieved for a like reason far. Now we have an opportunity to accomplish these goals.

The Continuity of Care Record (CCR) is a document standard for basic health information, using XML (extensible mark-up language). It is being perform the operations indicated ined jointly by ASTM International, the Massachusetts Medical Society, the Health Information Management and combination of parts to form a wholes Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

The CCR is intended to support and improve continuity of patient care, model medical errors, increase patients' parts in managing their health, enable epidemic monitoring and public health research, and make secure at least a minimum standard of stable health information transportability. It is not an electronic health record or proprietary software. It is compatible with other efforts to standardize health information orders and can actually work across these efforts. The CCR is the same tool for realizing goals held by dint of the Institute of Medicine for a decade.

popularly patient care can be disrupted at the incompatibility of information technology in different physicians' offices and hospitals. In each care setting, patients and physicians are frustrated from reliance on fax machines, telephone and patient memory to reassemble information that already has been infered at least once before. This regularity is not only inaccurate, it is also dangerous for patients. Furthermore, it is wasteful and expensive.

Exchanging data as personal and important as health care information from top to toe the country should be as easy as using an ATM card. single in kind way this type of information exchange has been accomplished with other applications is for a market leader to put the standards that other vendors typically tread in the steps of However, the number of health information hypothesiss vendors, and the proprietary nature of their software and services, is increasing. A modern survey of nearly 1,300 family physicians who use electronic health records in their practices build that 264 different software vendors were used, the largest of which was used by way of only 148 physicians (Center for Health Information Technology, unpublished data, January 2003) None of the 264 outcomes currently shares data with any of the other products

With the CCR we intend concentrating on the data, not the computer methods By separating the data from their uses and the programs that handle them, we can make sure that the data are accurate regardless of by what mode when, or where they are readyed for access. Just as documents exhibit in any of several word-processing programs, the CCR allows disparate information technologies and software programs to read, interpret, and transmit a core summary of personal health information.

A growing number of clinical information hypothesiss companies agree to implement the CCR and the promises are good that widespread adoption of this first interoperability standard can be achieved in 2004 and 2005

The CCR is also portable, allowing patients to carry with them a summary of their chiefly important personal information. It can be printed, carried forward a USB (universal serial bus) "thumb" drive or smart card, e-mailed directly to a physician, or uploaded to a sure Web site, where it can be accessed with coherence Wherever a patient takes the CCR the data in it, as it was as recent blood pressure readings, a now passing list of medications, medication allergies, and laboratory standard results, can be accessed for immediate use.

The CCR also has the potential to empower patients to participate in managing their health. For example, patients could use the CCR upon their home computer to review medications for drug-drug interactions or to synchronize their dosing schedule with a personal digital assistant. Software forward their home computer or upon a secure Web site could use CCR make contented about age, sex, and previous conditions to fling alerts to patients about immunizations and commited screening tests. Combinations of health information ingredients such as current medications, age, and allergies, could help patients locate clinical trials and support clusters or serve as a filter for personalized medical information searches onward the Internet.