I’ve recently experienced two hospitals’ EMR systems (one using Epic, the other Cerner) from the patient’s perspective. Integrating/accessing my data from external systems (in my case Apple Health) is roughly equivalent–the important things are (mostly) there like test results, procedures, medications, etc; they just do some things differently that are annoying:
* The Cerner hospital will duplicate medications for a single visit. It also classifies a bunch of vital signs as lab test results, so things like blood pressure don’t get merged in with other sources of data.
* The Epic system seems to use more recent/complex FHIR structures, so occasionally there’ll be more info in the raw data (this is more a knock on Apple Health though).
The Epic system has a big advantage with MyChart though. It’s their app and website for accessing your records at various hospitals. Through the app you can get push notifications of test results and schedule procedures. The latter was nice as I’d get roughly 15-30 minutes of advance notice before having a procedure done. The discharge instructions being made available in the app is also very helpful. Finally, being able to browse the raw clinical notes through the website, and request a dump of all of my data is appreciated.
* The Cerner hospital will duplicate medications for a single visit. It also classifies a bunch of vital signs as lab test results, so things like blood pressure don’t get merged in with other sources of data.
* The Epic system seems to use more recent/complex FHIR structures, so occasionally there’ll be more info in the raw data (this is more a knock on Apple Health though).
The Epic system has a big advantage with MyChart though. It’s their app and website for accessing your records at various hospitals. Through the app you can get push notifications of test results and schedule procedures. The latter was nice as I’d get roughly 15-30 minutes of advance notice before having a procedure done. The discharge instructions being made available in the app is also very helpful. Finally, being able to browse the raw clinical notes through the website, and request a dump of all of my data is appreciated.