Nearly all providers, 95 percent, express frustration over the inability to share and access electronic health information across the care continuum, according to a national survey conducted by Epocrates, a medical reference app from athenahealth.
To address this widespread dissatisfaction, athenahealth announced it will offer CommonWell Services for free to its 62,000 provider clients.
"The survey confirms what we hear anecdotally from providers every day — in healthcare, we can capture and store data electronically, but we fail miserably at sharing it across the care continuum," said athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush. "Being interoperable on paper or via system certification alone isn't good enough; vendors must take measures to advance actual interoperation activity across healthcare."
According to the Epocrates survey, 96 percent of physicians said the ability of EHRs to access patient data from other EHR platforms is important to improving patient care. Just 14 percent of physicians give the industry a B grade or higher on interoperability, while more than 60 percent give the industry a D or F.
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