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There is a growing list of hospitals adopting online or remote second opinions (RSOs). Second opinions, in general, are becoming more accepted by both patients and physicians, and telemedicine or remote medical encounters are becoming increasingly popular. This has led patients who are diagnosed with critical medical issues to seek ways to avail themselves of specialty medical knowledge and experience from providers that are not necessarily local to them.

Many hospitals that are completing the early stages of adoption of remote second opinion (RSO) systems may now be thinking through the integration of this system with their downstream systems. Most of the work performed by RSOs is intentionally performed outside of the hospital's EHR, PACS, pathology, or other electronic clinical records storage systems. However, should a patient that receives a remote second opinion visit the hospital for a procedure or inpatient visit, these records will need to become part of the hospital's permanent patient file.

It may be appealing for a healthcare organization to consider writing their own enterprise medical software to specifically meet their unique needs. Commercial software is generally written to serve the more general demands of the healthcare industry and often doesn’t address the nuances of each particular organizations' operations. This makes it attractive to the in-house team to believe that it uniquely understands these peculiarities and dive head-first into the deep end to begin to code.

Transferring patients between hospitals is a common occurrence at community hospitals and tertiary care facilities. Although not enough is known about the burden this puts on our healthcare system, it has been estimated that 1.6 million inpatients originated at another facility,¹ including 1.5% of all admitted Medicare patients.² Despite the high volume of patient transfers, there is no structured way to ensure that the patients medical records arrive along with them to the receiving institution. This has posed significant, and even life threatening outcomes, but is there a solution?

Most of the attention that telehealth has garnered over the past year has focused on using remote technology for synchronous virtual patient visits. During portions of 2020, these visits represented as much as 70% of all patient encounters.