Many health care providers have been working with Electronic Health Records not only because of the Meaningful Use program, which was designed by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to push adoption of the technology, but to improve population health as a whole. EHRs can collect useful medical data to give physicians a better understanding of a patient’s history, such as prescriptions medications or previously conducted Digital Imaging procedures.
Recently, the Institute of Medicine identified 17 social and behavioral areas that should be included in all EHRs. This information could prove vital to providing better health outcomes and improving the research capabilities of medical organizations.
Capturing factors in EHRs
According to the IOM, certain social and behavioral factors can have significant impacts on health and disease. By including this kind of data on an EHR, providers and health systems can better care for patients. However, many of these factors are not captured sufficiently by most EHR software.
Because of this, the IOM developed a set of criteria that can be used to identify certain social factors to be included in EHRs. These include:
- Usefulness of the factor, as measured by the individual and population
- Strength of the factor’s association with health care
- Availability and representation of a measurement for the factor
- Sensitivity of the factor, i.e. revealing personal information
- Feasibility of administrative time and cost of storage
- Data’s accessibility from another source.
The report, titled “Capturing Social and Behavioral Domains in Electronic Health Records,” compiled the research of a 13-member committee that included physicians and experts in information technology and social determinants of health. The domains they chose related to individual-level social relationships and the effect of communities, according to The Oncology Report. Some of the factors the committee selected were sexual orientation, employment, nicotine use, dietary patterns and physical activity.
CMS in concurrence
The IOM is not alone in believing that these social factors should be included in EHRs, as EHRIntelligence reported that providers might eventually be required to collect this data by the CMS. The impact of lifestyle determinants that normally fall outside of the scope of health care could be beneficial to analytics and population health management.
“Despite the fact that social and behavioral factors are important determinants of health, they are insufficiently captured in most EHRs. Their absence limits the capacity of health systems to address social and behavioral contributors to the onset and progression of disease and compromises the value of EHR data for research,” read the CMS statement, quoted by the news source.
The federal agency hoped that the data could lead to the development of additional clinical quality measures, which could be used in stage 3 of the Meaningful Use program. Over time, this might help identify gaps in the continuum of care that, in turn, would improve the quality of care being delivered to patients. Additionally, there could be cuts to health-associated costs due to a decrease in unnecessary readmissions and better population health management.
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Ronny Bachrach
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