sometimes While we seem to be treated to a constant barrage of negative news, there are some very positive things happening that bode well for our future, especially in the healthcare sector. Cost is usually the focus here, but there have been great strides in fighting cancer and other afflictions.
But it’s not just the dramatic advances in new health treatments that excite us. We are getting better at using medical information to treat patients more effectively.
One notable example is the collaboration between two giants just announced in their respective fields. Epic Systems for electronic records and Pacific Dental Services (PDS) for oral care. This collaboration has great potential to improve patient health outcomes. By fully implementing Epic Systems’ comprehensive medical records system in all of the nearly 900 dental practices it supports, PDS is ushering in a new era of dentist-physician collaboration. It highlights the potential benefits of understanding the connection between mouth and body, recognizing the number of diseases caused by poor dental health.
Epic’s state-of-the-art electronic health record system enables PDS-supported clinicians to share critical health information about their patients with other medical professionals. This is very important and cannot be overstated. all Relevant information about the patient.
Providers will be able to identify diseases such as diabetes and arthritis earlier, and patients will be able to access acute, primary and dental health history all in one place. They can use her MyChart patient portal on her Epic to connect with healthcare providers, make appointments, and request prescription refills.
PDS CEO Stephen E. Thorne IV rightly points out: – Body health.
This collaborative effort will affect many people. Epic maintains current electronic medical records for over 250 million patients. PDS converted approximately 10 million patient records from its existing practice management software to Epic and trained his team of approximately 14,000 members on the new system. Benefits are already being seen, such as rheumatoid arthritis diagnoses that were not discovered until health care providers had access to patients’ oral health records.
The partnership between PDS and Epic is the wave of the future. As these two pioneering companies have demonstrated, bringing dental and medical professionals together brings significant benefits to their practices, staff members, and most importantly, patients.
More broadly, such joint efforts to mobilize the information needed to improve patient care would be a very positive model for other healthcare sectors.
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