Electronic Medical Record - EMR

In the United States of America, every time a person goes in for a treatment with a healthcare service provider or a physician, the treatment, consultation, office visit, or a regularly scheduled check-up, is added to the physician providers’ medical record for the patient. The maintenance of these medical records done in a digital form is known as Electronic Medical Records (EMR). However, at present, less than 10% of physicians, healthcare service providers, and hospitals, use Electronic Medical Records software.

Why is it that EMR is not used more frequently?

One of the major answers to this question is related to the software itself. Most Health Information Technology systems or practice management systems, which support EMR, are not compatible with each other. For example, if Software A works on platform B, Software C works on Platform D with B &D not compatible with each other. Fearing loss of information in transmission and reception, lot of service providers and physicians continue to use the traditional paper form of maintaining medical records.

A second reason is that many service providers have felt that the digital scanning process, which is core to maintenance of Electronic Medical Records, is much too expensive. Although the digital scanning process would allow most of these service providers to collate historical data of the patient, dependability and cost remain the main issues preventing wider use.

With close to 90% of service providers still preferring to use the paper method to log a patient’s medical record, the process of digital scanning also encounters the challenge of illegible handwriting. The possibilities of format mismatch, files of different sizes, are other challenges that deter wider use of EMR.

However, the bigger issue of using EMR is data privacy. There still remain many individuals that are not convinced that maintaining one’s medical records electronically is confidential enough. This arises from the fact that apart from the doctor in itself, there is a cross section of people who could possibly access the patient’s record. Though engineers and software developers have coded new programs in such a way that data security is considered paramount, the results of this initiative are yet to be thoroughly tested.

Why should EMR be used?

The most compelling answer to that question is preservation and retrieval. Any data, which is preserved electronically, will be easy to retrieve in following years. This is an issue that is presently being looked at by the US government as the view on the matter is to start the preservation of medical records provided by Electronic Medical Records early in order the reap the benefits of the preserved data storage that is offered by EMR, in the future. As such, it is on the government’s agenda as a topic in need of further exploration.

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