Electronic Health Records (EHR) seem to be the hottest new way of storing patients' health-related information, from before birth to after death [1]. Hovwever, they are not new at all as early efforts began on the 60s and 70s; back then, academic medical centers were developing what they called clinical information systems [2]. Later, these clinical information systems would become what we now know as EHR. And it is true, they have come a long way, however...

Have they reached their full potential in the context of todays technologies?

We can a agree that the main reason EHR are so important and revolutionary is not only because of the storage advantage they proivde but for the acessibity they could. In this article, Ahmadi Maryam et al. have counducted a systematized review of EHR legacy, with the intention of identifying the capabilities and advantages that cloud computing techonologies could bring to the implementation of EHR, based on studies form 2007 to 2017.

Cloud computing is a computation that is done by a group of remote servers that form a network, it enables us to centralize the storage of data, as well as being able to access to services and computer resources. In other words, cloud computing allows us to gain acces to, not only, data stored on the cloud, but also, to computing resoruces to process said data. For this purpose they propose using Infrastucutre as a Service (IaaS). This kind of cloud service does not allow the consumers to control the infrastructure. However, it provides control of the operating system, storage, deployed applications and possibly the control of the selected network components [2].
As a result of their revision, they concluded that the capabilities and adavntages of using cloud computing in EHR could be classified in the 10 domains explained in the following table [2]:

Table

Conidering all the positive aspects mentioned above, it is evident than the implementation of Cloud Computing in EHR would be benefitial.

Howerver, as you may have noticed, this study is quite old (I know, 2018 is considered old now…); so, while researching on the topic I found a study that uses these advantages to create a middleware solition that enables seemles real-time transmission of vitals signs from monitors to cloud-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR)!! But I leave that for next time… Thanks for reading, see you soon!!

Refrerences:
[1] “Development of the Electronic Health Record”, Ama-assn.org. [En línea]. Disponible en: https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/development-electronic-health-record/2011-03.
[2] M. Ahmadi y N. Aslani, “Capabilities and advantages of Cloud Computing in the implementation of Electronic Health Record”, Acta Inform. Med., vol. 26, núm. 1, pp. 24–28, 2018.