Connected Health: Countries' Vary in Their Health IT Connectedness, but US Patients Are Ready, Willing and Welcoming EHRs

How electronically connnected and communicative are nations’ health information infrastructures? Accenture has answered that question in its report, Making the Case for Connected Health. Accenture built a “connected health maturity index,” analyzing a nation’s level of health information exchange among users along with their level of health IT adoption among specialists and primary care doctors. Adoption was defined across four HIT functions: administrative tools, electronic patient notes, electronic alerts/reminders, and computerized decision support systems.

Health information exchange was defined across seven connectivity dimensions: electronic communications, e-notifications, e-referrals, e-access to clinical data about patients who see a different provider, e-prescribing, and receipt of clinical results to populate patient EMRs and order requests.

The world leaders across these two dimensions are Denmark, New Zealand and Sweden where there’s nearly universal use by primary care doctors of EMRs. Spain and England, too, are more advanced than most...