The National Institutes of Health’s electronic health record, the Clinical Research Information System, was first built specifically for the nation’s largest research hospital twenty years ago.
It will be replaced soon, says Jon McKeeby, chief information officer at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
WHY IT MATTERS
According to Federal News NetworkDuring a panel session at the AFCEA Bethesda Health IT Summit last week, McKeeby told attendees that 40 of the 120 IT employees have reached retirement age.
If and when they retire, they will use their institutional knowledge of the legacy EHR system for clinical research, McKeeby said in the EHR modernization news. story.
“It has made it very complex and very dependent on specific people and specific skills, so it is very difficult to maintain.”
He said the NIH is working with the Miter Corporation on the requirements and performance work statement, and has so far collected more than 1,000 requirements for a new EHR that could accelerate the agency’s use of artificial intelligence.
A new EHR should also help NIH accelerate the implementation of AI to understand and summarize unstructured data to support clinical decision-making, he said, noting that regulations require data models to be continuously monitored, McKeeby said.
“Now we have all the tools to make it so that we can be more visual, interact with it, but also create summaries, and also predictive models to help us in healthcare.”
THE BIG TREND
The healthcare industry is looking to AI innovations that could reduce administrative burdens and fundamentally change physicians’ EHR experience, said Paul Brient, chief product officer of athenahealth.
“As rapidly evolving AI technologies have enormous potential to improve healthcare and its outcomes, the question of how to ensure their safe use in clinical care could well be the issue of the year for 2023, if not the decade,” shared Brient. Healthcare IT news in December.
With the right guardrails in place for security, transparency and ethics, Peter Shen, head of digital and automation at Siemens Healthineers, said that creating algorithms in collaboration with clinical partners to validate data before training improves its “ground truth” and therefore, increases their reliability to make more personalized clinical decisions.
ON THE RECORD
“It will be open to any supplier, even the existing supplier, but we need to move to a more integrated model, so that is the goal,” McKeeby said in the FNN story.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.