“A new approach to health care delivery may well provide a first taste of the value that can be realized when health IT is integrated into systems for delivering care and improving quality. The hope that simply plugging an electronic medical record (EMR) system into existing medical practices is worth the costs and will on its own improve health outcomes has yet to prove itself. But a paper just published in Clinical Trials provides a more enlightened vision for implementing EMR.
A cooperative agreement between the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Coordinating Center in Boston and the schools for Medicine and Public Health at Boston University, guided in part by a Stanford biostatistician, has resulted in the development of the “Point-of-care clinical trial.” This approach uses a programmable EMR to essentially run a persistent clinical trial, and allows the clinical knowledge gained by the growing data to be fed back into clinical practice.”
Article
Ano Lobb, Justmeans, 13 April 2011
