Tech giants are getting involved in the market of Electronic Health Records, worth $38 billion in 2025, by developing devices compatible with the new Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard. This standard will enable you an easier overview of your medical records as well as their sharing.
What is the Electronic Health Record?
The incompatibility of health records at different medical sites raised the need for standardization and free exchange of healthcare information. The Electronic Health Record (EHR), aimed at cleaning up the paper-based silos jungle of medical histories, is estimated to reach $38 billion by 2025 according to a new research report by Global Market Insights.
The achievement of such a figure will be supported by increasing government expenditure on healthcare IT solutions for improved understanding of diagnosis and treatments, by rising internet penetration as well as by awareness campaigns on EHR benefits among the doctor community. EHR is therefore expected, in a nutshell, to make medicine safer, to allow higher-quality care, to empower patients and to increase efficiency.
What does Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources allow?
To be enabled, the consolidation of medical records needs an internet-based standard for both storing and sharing patient information: the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is the base for that. FHIR extracts only the relevant data, such as symptoms or diagnoses, without transferring the documents themselves. This will allow a smooth sharing of information. As of today, the standard adoption encountered some resistance from healthcare providers which is expected to decrease thanks to the recent involvement of tech giants.
How will tech giants use FHIR?
Tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are definitely interested in such a promising opportunity. FHIR may in fact provide the first reliable gateway for user-generated health information from all the smart devices that are now part of your daily life. Among the different revenue streams for tech giants there is data monetization useful, for example, for personalized medicine, medical genetics or population health in general. That's why each tech giants is already taking actions on the topic, as well as joining forces: for example, the Blue Button, a USA government-endorsed project, shows how companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce are working together to support patients in the visualization and download of their own health records.
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