EHRs to save $78B over 5 years
EHRs are expected to save the global healthcare industry as much as $78 billion over five years, according to new analysis from Juniper Research.
The Juniper report, Digital Health, Remote Monitoring & EHR Cost Savings 2014-2019, notes that EHRs are crucial as the supporting infrastructure for a wide range of digital healthcare and mHealth projects. Also, new accountable care organization initiatives, where healthcare providers are paid according to the measured wellness of a patient population, are resulting in a re-think in how healthcare needs should be addressed.
The report finds that the medical profession will increasingly rely on EHRs to support disparate elements of digital health.
"Advanced EHRs will provide the ‘glue' to bring together the devices, stakeholders and medical records in the future connected healthcare environment," wrote Anthony Cox, Juniper associate analyst and author of the new report. Cox also noted that healthcare workers have become significantly more engaged in digital healthcare in the last 18 months.
[See also: EHR users unhappy, many switching.]
However, the report cautions that positive developments are being offset by the lack of randomized controlled mHealth trials and the diverse nature of the global healthcare industry. This means that digital healthcare approaches often require buy-in from a large number of stakeholders and have to be tailored for each geographical region, Cox explained.
Nevertheless, two key factors are expected to buoy the digital healthcare sector:
- The regulatory authorities are embracing the role of digital healthcare and imposing less stringent regulatory obligations on digital healthcare companies, the report pointed out.
- Also, the principle of technologically advanced healthcare is becoming popularized through Apple's HealthKit and Samsung's SAMI – Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions – user interfaces, it notes.
[See also: EHRs at risk of becoming irrelevant.]