One of the great promises of the push to EHR’s was the integration of risk across multiple related people. Sure, it’s nice to not have medical errors come up due to bad handwriting, and even nicer to have a linear record of your health–we won’t get started on the idea of being able to access your EHR from another healthcare system or hospital. That won’t happen for a while. But wouldn’t it be nice if say, three of your first degree relatives had a disease unknown to you or your doctor, and your EHR flagged that as an important issue to bring up in your next physical?

A recent, based on 2 million EHRs from three New York-based academic medical centers, showed that simply mining emergency contact information in EHRs could help predict a patient’s risk of developing 500 hereditary conditions. These included celiac disease and type 2 diabetes. Researchers identified 7.4 million familial relationships from reviews of standard emergency contact information included in patients’ EHRs.

If simply listing contacts could raise a flag about your healthcare, couldn’t we do so much more with a truly integrated EHR?

See the review in Becker’s here.