Along a stretch of road in Boston lie two hospitals within a mile of each another, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Beth Israel Deaconess Center. In the event that a resident nearby has a heart attack and is brought to the emergency department, the choice of hospital could determine how quickly he or she receives medications based on his or her medical history. That's because if the patient's electronic health record (EHR) resides at one institution, it may not be available in a format that can easily be read by the other hospital. Even if partial information is recorded about the individual in each system, “the data won't be able to talk to each other,” says Catherine DesRoches, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, a public policy research firm headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey.
A massive push toward digitizing health records came in 2009 when lawmakers in the US passed the HITECH—short for the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health—Act. To date, $547 million has been made available by that legislation for states to set up 'health information exchanges', which facilitate the transfer of electronic patient records between hospitals, diagnostic centers and pharmacies. But that money is now running out fast. And with the future of these exchanges in doubt, the prospect of harnessing them for research purposes is also under threat.
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