Dr. Robert Pearl, CEO of the Permanente Medical Group, says healthcare technology must demonstrate measurable improvement in patient outcomes.

Online video is becoming pervasive as a way to deliver patient care, but other emerging technologies likely won’t become more mainstream, a noted physician executive and author told attendees at the mHealth + Telehealth World 2017 conference in Boston.

Within the next several years as much as 30% of all doctor visits may be done online, says Dr. Robert Pearl, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group and author of “Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Health Care-And Why We’re Usually Wrong.”

“The healthcare system is broken, technology can be part of the fix,” Pearl told attendees. But for digital and mobile healthcare to become more effective, the healthcare system needs to develop and implement information technology that solves problems and that measurably improves patient outcomes. “If technology works, it must solve a major problem,” he says.

It’s all about measuring the outcomes and what’s improved.

There’s widespread agreement in the healthcare industry that to bring down costs and improve quality of care the industry needs to develop comprehensive and shared online access to patient data via a comprehensive electronic patient record, Pearl says.

But that universal access to electronic patient data likely won’t happen soon, he says. That’s because there is little incentive for major developers of electronic records systems such as Epic Systems Corp. and Cerner Corp. to integrate their proprietary systems and technology into a more open system. “It’s pretty agreed-upon that a comprehensive electronic health record is the way to go, but there’s little incentive for the vendors to open up their major APIs,” Pearl told attendees.

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An API, or application programming interface, is a “go-between” that enables a software program to interact with other software.

Pearl sees a checkered future for connected electronic health records. For a comprehensive online patient record to gain widespread adoption, it would have to make it easy for physicians to access relevant information, Pearl told attendees. “If it’s comprehensive, no doctor is going to read through the entire history to make a diagnosis for something happening now,” Pearl says.

The emerging technologies that will improve healthcare include video doctor visits and data analytics tied to a comprehensive electronic medical record. “It’s all about measuring the outcomes and what’s improved,” he says.

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