Screening and Prevention - Additional Benefits of an Integrated EMR

Dr. Jeff Curtis's presentation today "Practical Use of Registries" focused initially on capturing patient data and how it can be used for clinical, research and administrative purposes. He later pointed out that an added benefit of the collected information is the ability to use it for screening and prevention of co-morbidities.

Some examples include vaccination history, TB screening, cardiovascular risk assessment, and osteoporosis screening.

Key points for developing a registry/clinical eletronic medical record (EMR) that need to be taken into consideration include defined data fields, standardized clinical documentation, historical clinical data, outcome measures, and how to collect data smoothly without changing practice patterns.

Our take away points were the importance of linking health systems with "real time" data entry at the clinic visit with defined data elements. In a perfect world, we would have a National Rheumatology Registry in Canada.

More reports from ACR 2014