Information technology is rapidly touching nearly every segment of the healthcare industry, and a key part of the healthcare industry’s information revolution is electronic patient records. Patient record keeping is part science and part art when it comes to managing paper files, so moving patient records into the data realm makes perfect sense, but it is not without difficult.

Unlike, for instance, the maintenance records on a car, which can be shared between dealerships and service stations, far more people have a hand in updating a patient’s records. From hospital staff, to primary care physicians, to specialists, to therapists – the data must be shared and updated between many people.

The $64,000 question for HME providers is, will they become in the “electronic loop,” and if so, when? The answer could be sooner, rather than later, according to Kevin Johnson, a media relations manager working on behalf of Initiate Systems, a developer of master data management (MDM) solutions for the healthcare industry.

The linking and matching of customer records and data should be a consideration for any large company in the HME space from a commercial sense, Johnson says. While the management of patient information within healthcare organizations is already prevalent, the software is also being used by companies to simply do better business by keeping better track of customers and the ability to pull up any and all customer data “at any time, so that better business decisions can be made and acted upon.