Full Clinical Benefit of Electronic Patient Records In Question via @infomgmt

Full Clinical Benefit of Electronic Patient Records In Question via +Information Management - Greg Slabodkin says while studies on the electronic exchange of health information show some evidence of benefits for healthcare, the full impact of HIE on improving clinical outcomes and avoiding potential harms has been inadequately studied and needs additional research.

This is a US based study and analysis.  From the UK side, there was a project to implement a centralised patient records system but it was cancelled in 2011 after countless delays and escalating costs. I have to say as a UK patient there are several issues that the centralised system could have resolved which I have personal experience of:

• Patient records are currently stored in local data silos and there is no information sharing between them.  I have MRI scans in 2 hospitals in different areas and there is no sharing of that data between them.
• Communication between clinicians seems to be via paper letter, which is scanned in as a document, but there appears to be no OCR applied to it to add meaningful data to the computer system.

There has to be some form of communication - whether that be an interface, a centralised database, or something else.