Information technology is
rapidly touching nearly every segment of the healthcare industry, and a key
part of the healthcare industry’s information revolution is electronic patient
records. Patient record keeping is part science and part art when it comes to
managing paper files, so moving patient records into the data realm makes
perfect sense, but it is not without difficult.

Unlike, for instance, the maintenance records on a car, which can be shared
between dealerships and service stations, far more people have a hand in
updating a patient’s records. From hospital staff, to primary care physicians,
to specialists, to therapists – the data must be shared and updated between many
people.

The $64,000 question for HME providers is, will they become in the “electronic
loop,” and if so, when? The answer could be sooner, rather than later,
according to Kevin Johnson, a media relations manager working on behalf of
Initiate Systems, a developer of master data management (MDM) solutions for the
healthcare industry.

The linking and matching of customer records and data should be a consideration
for any large company in the HME space from a commercial sense, Johnson says.
While the management of patient information within healthcare organizations is
already prevalent, the software is also being used by companies to simply do
better business by keeping better track of customers and the ability to pull up
any and all customer data “at any time, so that better business decisions can
be made and acted upon.