According to InstaMed’s Tenth Annual Report, there is high consumer demand for digitization within healthcare. Yet, a staggering 87% of providers still leverage paper and manual processes for collecting data about patients. The burden of the paper load and manual data entry in healthcare leads to numerous tedious tasks for medical staff and a high risk of errors in medical records. Given the industry’s focus on interoperability and the ‘digitization’ of healthcare, why are 87% of providers still leveraging paper?
Fortunately, the answer can be both easy to explain and easy to solve! Providers rely on paper because it just works. While FHIR-based standard messaging via APIs, Direct Secure Messaging, the Direct StandardTM, and HL7 standards are all great solutions to the paperwork problem, they all rely on the sender and the receiver to be on the same ‘standard’ and also rely on the sender knowing the ‘standard’ the receiver is using to ingest their documents. For example, if the provider that sends over the patient’s records uses Direct Secure Messaging, but the provider receiving those records doesn’t have (or doesn’t use) their Direct address, then the standard of interoperability fails.
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SOURCE etherFAX
