Market Education

Paper Charts or Electronic Records

Paper charts are truly on the way out of healthcare. The ability to cost effectively assure quality data and care delivery documentation by handwritten documentation is not
practical. Federal initiatives beginning with President Bush’s Executive Order No 13335 setting incentives for information technology and the creation of a National Health
Information Technology Coordinator (formerly Dr. David Brailer, M.D, Ph.D.) and the release of the Decade of Health Information Technology- Framework for Strategic Action have set in action numerous committees and workgroups targeting the development of a National Health Information Network. The vision of most of these initiatives is to pass patient data from care provider to care provider in order to improve patient safety and reduce cost of health care delivery in the United States.

The ability to exchange data between different software systems is technically feasible and in some TIER® installations is currently happening. These installations utilize HL7 (please visit http://www.hl7.org/) interfaces where TIER® sends and receives information from other provider software systems. Traditionally data exchanged are admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) data or laboratory or pharmacy order data. Such exchange is only due to a mutually agreed to data standard (HL7) and its accompanying rules for exchange. HL7 is a widely used and established protocol for data exchange within hospital settings and it is extremely effective and efficient. HL7 will become increasingly important to all TIER® users in the near future. It will be the committee that builds the data dictionary of the universal electronic chart. The question will be “Who tells these data standards architects what a behavioral/chemical dependency chart/ include?”