A P R I L 2 0 1 5 O U T P A T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T 2 7
past 10 to 15 years — their
ability to communicate seam-
lessly with other systems — is
the advance that has made
them better and better.
In the early years of EMRs,
information was spread across
several different platforms:
charts were available through
one system, the lab's test
results through another, radi-
ology studies on a third. To
see all of them, you'd have to
log out of one and sign into
another, and any efforts at
consolidation required getting
your hands on paper copies
and scanning them in. This
was a huge limitation, and
extremely time-consuming.
Now, though, an EMR sys-
tem's ability to communicate
with non-related systems
means direct links to that
information. Health records,
lab tests, pathology findings,
X-rays — they're all automati-
cally there and just a click
away.
W
hen contaminated steroid injections sparked a
multi-state fungal meningitis outbreak in 2012,
killing 64 patients and infecting 751, investiga-
tion and response efforts were reportedly hindered by the diffi-
culties that public health authorities met in obtaining patient
health information from healthcare facilities' electronic medical
records systems.
As a result, CDC researchers are leading a study to evaluate the
challenges that public health officials faced in accessing EMRs during
the outbreak, with the aim of improving the information sharing
process to better handle future healthcare-associated infection inci-
dents (tinyurl.com/mjcrgtp).
The CDC researchers, along with staff from the Association of
State and Territorial Health Officials and the Keystone Center, a
Colorado-based non-profit policy research organization, are current-
ly interviewing health department officials from 15 states, with
plans to interview representatives of healthcare facilities in those 15
states, including infection preventionists and information technolo-
gy staff.
The participating states are Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland,
Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North
Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
— David Bernard
LESSON LEARNED
EMR Access Essential to
Public Health Response
z CONNECTION FAILED
A 2012 fungal meningitis out-
break highlighted the importance
of improved information sharing.
