Using cloud
applications
to enhance
EHR access

With everyone seemingly using health apps on smartwatches and plenty of cloud applications supporting electronic health records (EHRs), and electronic medical records (EMRs), why is your doctor’s office still using a fax machine to transfer records? At least 70% of providers still use paper files and fax machines to exchange medical information. While that approach is effective, it is also inefficient, slow, and is increasingly seen as a roadblock to improved patient care.

Despite the inefficiencies of using dated technology, health systems and providers still rely heavily on paper-based methods for exchanging healthcare information. There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs: many doctors’ offices, hospitals, labs, medical imaging facilities, pharmacies, and medical providers have long suffered from using outdated technology, a lack of interoperability between systems, costly implementation and other barriers to EHR adoption.  Sometimes there simply is no other way of exchanging records with clinicians who might sit outside of a hospital network or sit between providers.

Increasingly, healthcare cloud applications are helping to close the gap. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provides regulatory guidelines to secure healthcare information while in transit and in storage. This is often referred to as data in motion and data at rest. Cloud technology is transforming the way hospital systems, clinicians, medical specialists and providers are able to share and transfer patient sensitive data, by making digital versions of a patient’s chart available (nearly instantaneously) with the added benefits of verifying authorized users before releasing the patient information.

EHRs facilitate the secure exchange, storage, and access to patient information by authorized users across the healthcare landscape. Advances in EHRs help support the delivery of efficient, integrated, high-quality healthcare. 

Applications in the cloud can support the exchange of clinical records across disparate systems, doing so in a secure and efficient manner. Medical applications can use health data standards to support interoperability (including CPT codes, ICD-10 codes and HL7 FHIR) to increase EHR access and security. Cloud based applications are often built from the ground up using these standards, increasing the ease that data can be seamlessly and securely shared across systems.

The potential of using cloud applications to improve healthcare processes is almost limitless, but one of the greatest and most immediate opportunities lies in the reduction of the use of traditional faxing. One simple example is eFax (a cloud-based application) that uses standards-based EHR access that can embed directly into electronic records to support communication between secure systems. This happens through application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrate faxes into the EHRs themselves—meaning facilities using cloud faxing can send, retrieve and even store faxes in their systems for easy access and for sharing within or outside their organization. eFaxes can help to cut back on the work required to locate paper files as well as the cost of keeping and properly disposing of hard copy files.