Electronic Health Record

Electronic Health Records are an easy way to have all of the patient’s information in one place.  Most doctors offices and hospitals are moving towards Electronic Health Records and doing less paperwork, while this might sound like a great idea to have all of your information in one place it still doesn’t replace paper charts just yet.  While most do use Electronic Health Records, there are still doctor’s offices that you have to fax information to that don’t have Electronic Health Records.  This leads random paperwork for the hospital and the doctor’s office and because not everyone has Electronic Health Records, this can have a bad effect on the patient’s health and life.

Since Electronic Health Records are something new, they are still working out all the kinks.  For example, although you might think they have all of your information in their computer but in most cases there are things missing.  Some of this information might not mean much to diagnosing you but if something very important is left out it can kill you.  There is also bad things that can happen with paperwork as well, it gets lost or misfiled and that is information that is important that is just gone.

The increase of Electronic Health Records has lead to less paper records but some places use a hybrid of the two, which can lead to lost information.  The hybrid method used by some practices has lead to malpractice claims because a patient’s information was lost and caused something serious to happen to them, all because they didn’t have the information or they didn’t have the right information.  Another downfall is that some Electronic Health Records systems can’t communicate with each other, so information still has be faxed over.  Cerner Corporation and Epic Systems are two of the biggest systems used by hospitals but you can’t share information from one system to the other.

Sharing information is a very important part of getting the right diagnosis and preventing complications.  The health care system needs to make up its mind on whether to use paper or computers to store their information.  This will prevent lost information and help the health care system run better.  If they decide to use Electronic Health Records, then they need to have one system that can store all of the information and that they can share with other systems and make sure they keep up to date records of all patients.