Patient mediated tools and apps to access health records in 2020

With the rise in technology and healthcare awareness, more healthcare providers look toward new and innovative tools to learn more about their patients and find ways to make healthcare experience more efficient. With the inclusion of technology in the healthcare industry, more patients are using online portals to access their medical information. According to an analysis for the National Coordinator for Health IT presented at its annual conference, nearly 60% of patients reported that they were provided with the online access to their medical records by their provider in 2019 which significantly increased from 2018. It was not that long ago when health Records were documented on paper and were stored in computers manually; often taking hours to complete, make it a huge effort to accomplish. Since healthcare industries are huge, any new implementation would take time to catch up with consumers’ needs. But thanks to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for initiating EHR incentive programs to encourage patient involvement in their health care in 2011, people have started accessing their health records electronically and of the population those who do, 60% used computers and 40% used a smart phone health app. In 2019, roughly one in five patients who accessed their record online transferred their personal health information to a third party, compared to 14% in 2017 and 15% in 2018, according to ONC. This growth of patient engagement shows people’s growing trust and ease towards technology with their Health data. CMS also introduced new rules for interoperability and patient access in 2020 under the cures act.

Technological Advancement around the world is helping people to find solutions to challenging problems in Healthcare. From secure cloud platforms to wide range of Internet Of Things, are helping startups to provide the best in class solution for patients in areas like Patient Engagement, Telemedicine, Nutrition and many more. Investors are investing more time and money than ever in digital health space.

Not only startups but big companies like Epic , Allscripts and eClinicalWorks are adapting themselves to catch with fast paced technology advancements and growing consumers needs. ONC looked at adoption of patient portals by pulling data from the Apple and Google app stores. Epic MyChart, followed by eClinicalMobile from eClinicalWorks, then Allscripts’ FollowMyHealth were the three most popular portals on the Apple app marketplace, while on Google’s, MyChart again snagged the top spot, followed by FollowMyHealth, then eClinicalWorks.

In the year 2019, we saw healthcare tools growing exponentially with wearables, medication dispensers, technology that tracks user’s brain patterns and heart rate and others. The new vision for healthcare for 2020 and beyond will not just focus on access, quality, and affordability but also on predictive, preventive, and outcome-based care models promoting social and financial inclusion. The solutions will have more Artificial Intelligence and Predictive analysis approach to it. Tools promoting telehealth will gain mainstream adoption in the overall mix of healthcare services. Precision medicine-led approaches will pave the way for next-gen health data analytics solutions. 2020 will be a year of promoting the ‘Comparison Shopping’ consumer mindset. With growing belief and support from consumers, there’s a lot to expect in the near future.

Since most of the technology solutions are data driven, we at 1upHealth envision to improve healthcare by providing patient electronic health records in clean fhir format. We are driven to be a solution, which provides an extensive yet human readable patient data format, to empower organizations doing good for the world that’s why we have grown our network to over 10,000 health facilities across U.S and working on adding more. We believe that patients should own their data and should have access to it whenever and wherever they want. That’s why we also provide a clean and intuitive interface on mobile and web with our patient app , for patients to view their health data where they can connect with multiple providers and be updated on their health.