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A recent study demonstrates that electronic health record (EHR) technology can deliver personalised, long-term treatment for high-risk heart patients.

By Anonymous on Nov 20, 2012

Researchers at Northwestern Medicine have discovered that doctors using EHR’s to send individual risk assessments by mail to cardiovascular disease (CVD) patients were more likely to prescribe treatment that lowered their cholesterol in the long-term.

Northwestern Medicine took a unique population-wide approach to find a group of at-risk patients who were not receiving cholesterol-lowering treatment. There were 29 physicians and 435 at-risk patients in this study of which, 14 physicians and 218 patients were put in a test group. The study’s EHR system automatically notified physicians in the test group of high-risk patients who then received personalized risk assessments. Following this, patients in the study used this risk assessment information to discuss cholesterol-lowering options with their doctors.     

After an 18 month follow-up, it was found that 22% of patients in the test group lowered their cholesterol considerably as a result of receiving lipid-lowering medication. The study also confirmed that doctors may have an inaccurate perception of patients’ risks if risk assessment is not carried out in primary care. But, Stephen Persell, M.D., assistant professor of general internal medicine and geriatrics at the Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, and first author on the study reportindicated that there was further room for improvement. He said: “Many patients who had increased cardiovascular risk and got the risk message sent to them still did not get their cholesterol lowered. Future studies can examine if repeated exposure to these messages leads to bigger changes over time."

However, there are still mixed views amongst healthcare advocates in relation to the adoption of EHR technology for patients. Health IT experts indicate that national patient safety guidelines need to be adopted in conjunction with EHR technology that could focus on wider methods to measure safety events. Additionally, a recent study conducted by McMaster University, Ontario revealed that only 31 out of 36,000 HIT studies had improved the health of patients. Moreover, even though the number of US physicians using EHR technology has increased by 50% in the last three years, doctors still do not receive timely information from specialists or hospital providers. Furthermore, Twila Brase, president of the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF) said:  "The problems that the government continues to ignore are privacy and patient consent; no EHR program should move forward until every American has a guaranteed right of consent over the use and sharing of their private medical records."