MaRS client VitalHub offers doctors high-tech patient charts at their fingertips

MaRS client VitalHub offers doctors high-tech patient charts at their fingertips

Note: This blog was originally published on Digital For Health. It has been reposted here with permission from the author.

Do doctors use electronic systems? The data at first seems contradictory. Most doctors have tablets and love them, but very few doctors use email to connect to their patients. The important factor is whether an electronic system provides value to their work (time savings, economies, efficiencies) while avoiding risk (regulatory, legal, liability).

Doctors are very busy. For them, technology must provide real value if they are to adopt it. And when there is a choice between easy-to-use versus more complete but hard-to-use, the former usually wins if doctors have a choice.

So consider the challenge facing physicians who routinely work in several medical institutions. Each institution is likely to have a different electronic health record (EHR) system, and these systems are notoriously cumbersome. EHR systems often do not offer mobile support, so busy physicians, often moving around, must sit at desks in each institution to review patient data from each EHR. Further, they cannot get a consolidated view across systems.

What is required is a simple, consistent, mobile interface to any EHR, and the ability to combine patient data from multiple EHR systems. MaRS client VitalHub has developed a slick solution, VitalHub Chart, which addresses these needs. Physicians can access consolidated patient data from multiple EHR systems using a mobile tablet.

First they select the patient of interest:

Patient of interest

And then gain a consolidated view of the data available on that patient:

From which they can get more details. For example, laboratory results, with visual cues highlighting values of concern:

Currently, iOS and Android devices are supported from a cloud service that communicates with VitalHub Servers installed at each institution.

Next time you visit your doctor, look to see if he orshe is accessing your health data from a tablet and, if so, from how many systems.