The U.S. is among the countries spearheading the adoption of digital health records globally... In fact, it’s the only digital technology that the U.S. leads in healthcare, according to Philips’ U.S. Future Health Index (FHI) 2019 Report.

The Dutch-based healthcare giant ranks the "Land of Opportunity" below the 15-country average leveraging the full use of digital healthcare technologies, including telemedicine and AI. And while used by 84 percent of U.S. healthcare professionals, DHRs still come with their share of challenges.

“Federal legislation, such as the HITECH Act, helped drive adoption of DHRs over the last ten years and helped U.S. healthcare move away from disparate, paper-based processes to digital records. Unfortunately, this rush to digitize came without common industry standards for data exchange and normalization, contributing to data silos and interoperability challenges,” Dr. Joseph Frassica, head of Philips Research, the Americas, and chief medical officer at Philips North America, told HCB News. “Today, 75 percent of healthcare data in our DHRs is unstructured, making it difficult to access and analyze.”

Lack of standardization hinders interoperability, with 52 percent of American healthcare professionals less inclined to share health records among their peers inside their own facilities. In addition, 57 percent lacking access to DHRs. This in turn prevents professionals from extracting and using information to create large-scale data sets necessary for developing tools such as AI.

Combined with a lack of investments and regulations around the reliability and performance of AI, these challenges have lead to only 33 percent of U.S. professionals utilizing AI, compared to 41 percent of German and 85 percent of Chinese professionals.

Another missed opportunity is telehealth. A quarter of U.S. individuals indicate that consulting with a physician remotely for follow-up appointments via video or voice call improved their healthcare experience in the last five years. Despite this and reported reductions in clinician burnout, only 46 percent of U.S. healthcare professionals use the technology, which also lacks investments and regulations. Professionals also require more education in how it can help them spend more time with patients, be more proactive in a patient’s health, and minimize missed appointments, according to the report.

Patients, too, are partially responsible for these low rates, with 58 percent of U.S. individuals not seeing a healthcare professional when medically necessary due to lack of time, difficulty in making appointments and the lack of available specialists or care providers in their area. In addition, only 20 percent believe AI leads to more accurate diagnoses, while 37 percent associate it with less human interaction with healthcare.

Age-related views also contribute to these trends, with 42 percent of millennials saying it is not important for their healthcare professional to know their data. Of the 18 percent of Americans that do not want to share their data, 20 percent are millennials. In addition, 23 percent do not know how to share it, and 29 percent are likely to choose money over health, compared to 15 percent of baby boomers and 22 percent of Generation X.

Fifty-four percent of U.S. healthcare professionals believe that adoption of DHRs negatively impacts time spent with a patient, the most likely of professionals in any country. Sixty-one percent indicated that AI adds to healthcare professional workloads, while 44 percent said it reduced healthcare professional satisfaction.

“Technology providers need to move from acting as vendors of products to being partners in solutions for their customers. Technology companies need to deeply understand a health system’s challenges in order to help them decide which AI and telehealth solutions could meet their needs,” said Frassica. “Healthcare institutions need to work with healthcare technology solutions providers to create a clear vision for AI and telehealth within their organization, and work together to educate and deploy it. Sharing best practices and learnings among health systems — taking the time to talk to those who are deploying AI and telehealth, and understanding the challenges and benefits, will help other organizations develop their own plans.”