Closing the "evidence gap" to allow providers to deliver more informed care will require better coordination between physicians and data scientists with access to years of patient records, data leaders from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care and Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic wrote May 17 in Harvard Business Review.
Nigam Shah, PhD, chief data officer of Stanford Health Care, and John Halamka, MD, president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, pointed to Stanford's Green Button Informatics Consult Service, which offered technology-backed clinical consults, as a model. Similar technology is now being used at Mayo, Duarte, Calif.-based City of Hope and New York City-based Columbia University.
The idea is to get providers an evidence-backed analysis of deidentified, longitudinal data to inform their diagnoses and treatments within 24 hours of seeing the patient. The Stanford project spawned startup Atropos Health; other companies using EHR for patient care include Lucem Health, Nference and Omny Health.
"In the last 40 years, despite the tremendous investment in technology and policy to drive digital innovation in care, physicians are still making a plethora of clinical decisions without data," Drs. Shah and Halamka wrote. "Expert-in-the-loop services that use now-available technology and data can help change that, delivering on the initial promises of electronic health records to turn real-world clinical insights into improved patient care."