The growing push to align telemedicine with electronic health records gained momentum this week when AMC Health integrated its wares with Epic.
AMC Health and Epic are part of a wider effort to bridge the gap between telehealth technologies and the patient data stored in EHR systems. Allscripts and American Well integrated their products, for instance, to enable American Well's telehealth platform to mesh with the Allscripts EHR.
Taking a similar tack, AMC Health and Epic’s partnership joins one of the nation's largest telemedicine providers with a market-leading EHR vendor to enable data from AMC Health's telehealth platform to more easily populate Epic EHRs, and vice versa.
Advocates of this trend hope agreements like these will not only speed up the adoption of EHRs by giving clinicians access to more relevant patient information — in particular, biometric data gleaned from home health monitoring programs and wearable devices — but that such integration will also propel use of telehealth, which has been lagging as provider networks first deal with EHR adoption.
AMC Health CEO Nesim Bildirici explained that the arrangement increases workflow efficiency and enables caregivers to access the patient narrative within an Epic EHR.
"More and more providers are looking to effectively monitor patients in their homes on a daily basis,” Bildirici said in a prepared statement, “and that is easier to accomplish when the telehealth and EHR solutions are properly integrated.”
The end-goal for AMC Health and Epic customers is that clinicians will be able to access patient data collected in the home or a different care setting, Bildirici added, there enabling “a more complete longitudinal view without having to look across multiple systems, and the data will be available for use with the hospital’s or health system’s analytics applications.”
Telehealth has typically been seen from a patient's perspective and has gained traction in the payer community, but providers have been slow to recognize its value to them in the care delivery process, American Well CEO Roy Schoenberg, MD, told mHealth News when it aligned with Allscripts in August 2012.
With these partnerships, the development of the Accountable Care Organization and other emerging models of care delivery and willingness by payers — including the federal government — to reimburse for telehealth services, Schoenberg said, there will be “a dramatic movement in the market from a business standpoint."
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