Health Care : Stakeholders interested in EHR

A Patient's EHR is of great interest to many stakeholders in the Health Care Industry. Each Stakeholder is interested in different aspects of a EHR.

The important Stakeholders in the Health Care Industry are :-

• Patient
  
• Providers
• Payors
• Suppliers
• Academic Centers
• Government

The interests of these Stakeholders vary - however, the source of information that will validate their assumptions and provide factual data is the EHR.

The primary interests of these Stakeholders can be summarized thus :-

• Patient : too understand the nature of the current ailment
  
• Providers : the understand the Medical History of the patient.
  
• Payors : Insurance Companies, etc.
  
• Suppliers : to understand the current supply / demand for Drugs, etc.
  
• Academic Centers : to understand the current trends in the field & research.
  
• Government : to understand the overall health status of the citizens in the country.
  

E.g; If a patient is admitted to a new Hospital, the doctors would definitely be interested to know the Medical History of the patient & the treatment administered by other Providers.

Hence, it is important that the EHR follow a standard. The standard should allow the Stakeholders to query the stored information or a subset of the information.

The standard for the EHR should address consistency in two areas :-

1. Storage of the data
2. Retrieval of the data ( entire data / a subset of the data ).

Health Level 7 ( HL7 ) is an international standard for storing and sharing clinical Health Information. HL7 is used to exchange EHR information as well as many other details across various Health care domains.