Providers have sunk millions into their EHRs, and the imperative to make good on the investment has never been stronger. As the EHR continues to evolve and change the way care is delivered to patient populations, provider organizations and pharmaceutical companies alike need to increase collaboration efforts in targeted ways to see the most benefit.
A partnership between the two to optimize their EHRs is a proactive and practical way to achieve shared goals—providing the best possible care to patients and engaging clinicians in that work.
One way is for provider-pharma partners to use EHR data to quickly identify and recruit eligible patients for clinical research trials, which would enable providers to have a more direct impact on drug development and innovation. Additionally, real-time data can generate a larger pool of eligible populations more quickly, helping to fast track a new therapy through the clinical testing stage, saving time, money, and effort for both providers and pharma companies.
This is a good idea provided that patients opt-in for this. This was not mentioned in the article. Also read “EHRs Are #Pharma's Digital Marketing Tools, Say Authors of a NEJM Article”; http://sco.lt/6ebfu5