EHR Design Must Better Support Care Coordination

Electronic health records could improve patient care coordination among providers if they were better designed for such functionality, according to a perspective article published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

The authors, from RAND Corp., Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, said that coordinating a patient's care can involve the assembly of much disparate information and takes significant time and effort, resulting in "poor" coordination and errors. EHRs can help, they said, but not the way they're currently designed.