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The Evolution of Electronic Health Records: Past, Present, and Future

Doug McDonald Product Director, Alliance PLM Published 12 Jul 2022

Over the last 60 years, electronic health records have been evolving to improve patient care, minimize errors, and create cost efficiencies. What will the next 60 years bring? I can’t help to think of the world-renown book 1984, written by George Orwell over 70 years ago. What if the technology renaissance is not as scary as the dystopian novel illustrates? Could this technology be used for the greater good instead of evil?

Electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems will transform. The future of leveraging big data and quantum computation of health data to devise impactful, customized, and predictive treatment plans may be out of a science-fiction novel. Still, I believe we are well on our way to seeing these breakthroughs in the next 60 years.

By 2035, will physician decision support leverage a century of family history combined with historical treatment strategies that lead to the best possible outcomes based on big-data computation? By 2040, will health data utilization with predictive modeling become so precise that your doctor can create a healthcare plan for an issue you have yet to develop?

While fantasizing about the possibilities of the future is undoubtedly fun, we cannot fully appreciate this without a bit of a history lesson/timeline for the journey of the Electronic Health record emerging in the 1960s. Therefore, to fully illustrate the Evolution of Electronic Health Records, we’ve created an infographic that visualizes both a historical and futuristic look at patient data analytics in healthcare.

Infographic Evolution of Electronic Health Records Timeline

So, I firmly believe that healthcare will be transformed in the coming decades. It is my belief that physician decision support software, medical (big) data, and predictive modeling will play essential roles in the transformation. When technology is brought to bear on issues of health and medicine, I believe it can revolutionize every facet of human life

In the meantime, you can grab the full PDF version of this infographic via the link below. So, please take a moment to download the PDF, print it out in full color, and display it in your office. And don’t forget to share it with all your techno colleagues so they can also glimpse into the future of healthcare.

Download the PDF version of the infographic today!

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