Adapting an EHR for Europe

Source: Healthcare IT News.com  
Written by Chip Means, Associate Editor
Thursday, 31 May 2007

ATLANTA - Regional standards may present a barrier to competition in Europe's electronic health records market, as offshore vendors face challenges in adapting their systems to local requirements. The upshot is that some such vendors are now forming strategic partnerships with European healthcare organisations.

eMedicalFiles (eMF), a healthcare IT vendor based in the United States, is developing partnerships and a flexible EHR for its planned entry into the European market.  eMF's MDAware EHR system requires modifications when it's delivered outside of the United States, said Jay Moskowitz, chairman and CEO of eMF. He noted that the United States still only uses ICD-9 codes in a world that now uses ICD-10.

"It has a whole lot to do with the proprietary thinking of the American medical community. We haven't adopted and changed as quickly as the rest of the world relative to standards," Moskowitz said. "But plans are on the table to convert to ICD-10, probably two to three years from now."

eMF therefore designed an ICD-10-compliant EHR for foreign markets. "eMF has the flexibility to allow a user in Spain to just buy an ICD-10 system; but users in the U.S. currently use ICD-9 and will make a conversation to ICD-10 when mandated by simply clicking on a box on our screen when appropriate to convert to ICD-10," he said.

Moskowitz said that in Europe, the adoption of new healthcare IT standards is facilitated by the fact that standards are issued by governments, whereas in the United States, competitive private entities develop them. "Adoption rates in Europe are much easier to deal with than they are here," he said. "What (eMF) has that other (vendors) don't have is we've anticipated a lot of the future standards and regulatory requirements that will be coming down the pipe," said Moskowitz.

Moskowitz stressed the importance of the security, privacy and portability to the EHR. "One of the strategic initiatives is that we want you to be able to carry your medical records anywhere you go," he said. "To have the ability to access your records in situations like that makes continuity of care much more effective." Three levels of patient privacy are built into MDAware, the base of which is digital finger imaging.

MDAware also has unique and value-added reported capabilities and built-in error-proofing, Moskowitz said. Additionally, the EHR can identify the patient at the point of care. "We've had an extraordinary amount of design input from physicians," he noted.

eMedicalFiles is in the process of negotiating several relationships for distributing MDAware within Europe, and will be in final negotiations with one company soon, Moskowitz said.