American Health Information history

In 1929, Blue Cross Blue Shield established the first employer-sponsored health coverage in Dallas as a partnership between the Baylor University hospital and its patients.

In 1938, the Association changed its name to the American Association of Medical Record Librarians (AAMRL) to better communicate the organization’s focus on health records.

The executive order, issued in 1942, was in response to the labor shortage the country was facing due to its participation in World War II. As a result, businesses began to use employer-sponsored health care benefits as a way to attract employees.

In 1964, El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA worked with Lockheed Corporation to develop a hospital information system that included medical records, but generally computer manufacturers did not understand the healthcare industry’s needs.

One of the largest health care acts in American history, commonly referred to as the Medicare and Medicaid Act, was approved by President Lyndon B. Johnson in July 1965.

The first attempt at a total, integrated health records system was implemented in a gynecology unit at the University Medical Center in Burlington, Vermont in 1971.

The Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis created the Regenstrief Medical Record System in 1972.

Eventually, in 1974, Kennedy presented a compromise, though it not only lost approval from unions, but also was dropped entirely due to President Nixon’s Watergate scandal and subsequent resignation from office.

In 1982, Dragon Systems developed a voice recognition prototype to the cheers of medical assistants everywhere!

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee established the World Wide Web and while healthcare wasn’t immediately affected, the web and browser technology established an expectation of how to access, share and navigate information.

The study wouldn’t be published until 1991, but it found security issues, lack of standards and cost were the primary barriers to adopting electronic health records at the time.

In 1994, the World Health Organization adopted the ICD-10 coding standard.

In his 2004 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush called for computerized health records – the beginning of the electronic health record (EHR) revolution.

AMIA and CAHIIM created a task force in 2008 to analyze the widening scope of health informatics and graduate level program accreditation.

Present-day healthcare organizations are implementing functional EHR systems with more intensity than ever thanks to President Obama’s passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009.

IN 2010, CAHIIM began accreditation of health informatics graduate programs.

In 2011, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology started working with the 62 Regional Extension Centers (RECs) across the nation to help healthcare providers migrate to electronic healthcare record systems.

ARRA “requires the adoption of Electronic Medical Records by 2014 for seventy percent of the primary care provider population,” according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

As of 2015 96 percent of hospitals and 87 percent of office-based physician practices were using electronic health records (EHRs).