Dr Robert Watcher, chief hospitalist and chief of the medical service at the UCSF Medical Center has told the American Medical Informatics Association that digital healthcare has well and truly arrived, and is here to stay. “It is not an exaggeration to say that in the last five years, we have gone from a primarily analog business to a primarily digital business. That is a huge deal,” Mr Watcher told delegates, saying that it was thanks to the US government's $30bn in financial incentives for doctors to use Electronic Health Records that the transformation had happened, and caused Silicon Valley to "invade" healthcare. The shift towards electronic health records (EHRs) began with the introduction of the first version of HealthVault software by IBM in 2003.
Dr Robert Watcher, chief hospitalist and chief of the medical service at the UCSF Medical Center has told the American Medical Informatics Association that digital healthcare has well and truly arrived, and is here to stay. “It is not an exaggeration to say that in the last five years, we have gone from a primarily analog business to a primarily digital business. That is a huge deal,” Mr Watcher told delegates, saying that it was thanks to the US government's $30bn in financial incentives for doctors to use Electronic Health Records that the transformation had happened, and caused Silicon Valley to "invade" healthcare. There is, however, much more work to be done, EHR providers need to work together to "figure out interoperability", and fix the alerting models that some providers have, which are leading to "alert fatigue".