Jamie Franklin, Community Health System’s chief information officer, remembers the moment 15 years ago that he vowed to help change the way patients and doctors access their medical records. He was hours away from home, sitting in front of cancer specialists with a family member who was there for a consultation and, hopefully, a plan of care.

“I call it the ‘two days of hell’ prior to that of going to lab and to radiology clinics, the physicians’ offices to collect all these paper records and films and put them all together,” describes Franklin. “We had 15 minutes with a series of specialists at this health center to do the evaluation and set the treatment.”

After going through the records spread out before them, the specialists announced they had bad news: one of the previous medical offices had provided the wrong medical records. “They were dated records,” Franklin explains, “so the specialists were needing to make a recommendation off of dated information, and they did the best they could.

“I remember sitting there listening to this consultation for my family member thinking, ‘We can do better than this for patients,’” says Franklin, who still chokes up thinking about how things could have gone wrong for his loved one.

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