The Learning Healthcare System:

The Learning Healthcare System:: "The opportunities to use EHRs as a basis for increased collaboration between patient and provider are immense. One major consideration in everyday health care is medication list management. This is a truly important area because we are caught in a paradigm where there is a disconnect between what a physician thinks a patient is taking and what the patient is taking in reality. In this case, patients have the opportunity to play a critical role in the translation of everyday information to their provider through the utility of tools such as EHRs. Currently, however, few patients think it is their responsibility to keep track of what they are actually taking. These new tools present an opportunity to change the culture that fosters this disconnect for both the patient and the provider. Another opportunity centers around the ability to update conditions and status. There is a lot of work being done on interactive patient portals where patients can manage personal health records. This will require a better understanding of how patients view their own condition relative to how a health professional would characterize them, but nonetheless has significant opportunity to benefit the patient, make disease states more understandable to the provider, and provide a means to generate information for the healthcare system. "