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Electronic Medical Records
All of us have, at
one time or the other, visited a General Practitioner. Some of us more
than others! Each time we go there, there are diagnostic reports,
medical reports, charts, blood and stool reports and assorted other
documents that go into making our individual case files –
big, fat paper files bloated with paper down the ages. But if you have
visited your doctor of late, this file would have been conspicuous by
its absence. There’s no surprise there. You’ve just
witnessed the miracle of electronic medical records.
For a few years now, electronic medical records have been slowly but
steadily making their presence felt in hospitals and nursing homes, not
just in America, but across the globe. It was only natural to expect
them. After all, we live in the Information Age and medical records are
but another form of information. Or data if you like. And when it comes
to a sensitive topic like health, information truly is power.
There were (and continue to be) several problems with conventional
paper medical records. For one thing, they were bulky and easily
destructible. The information present in them, if considerable, made
them unwieldy to file and find. Being filed by human operators, who
often have other more pressing tasks, made them susceptible to errors
and mis-categorization. Sharing these records, for instance between
your GP and a specialist, between hospitals, across international
boundaries etc., was laborious and time consuming – not to
mention at a high risk of loss. And finally, doctors and other medical
professionals were unable to compile this wealth of information to
extract statistical, medical and other critical information from it.
The electronic medical records were thus a natural progression. It was
only a matter of time before the archival, storage and retrieval
technologies that have been used successfully in several other fields
were adopted by the medical record profession. And electronic medical
records have lived up to their promise of efficiency. For one thing,
they have practically eliminated all the problems of the conventional
medical records. The information is easily fileable (at source),
findable, displayable and sharable. It can be stored in a compact
manner and duplicated for distribution at the click of a button.
Medical and analytical professionals can use the data from numerous and
diverse source to compile information reports that can help in
continuing research and innovation. And electronic medical records can
also result in the development of critical decision-making tools that
could very well save scores of lives.
Of course Electronic Medical records have their shortcomings. But most
of these are limited by the human capacity or acceptance of change
rather than the technology itself. In some cases, the districts or
counties that need to migrate to electronic medical record systems may
not have the necessary resources for the conversion to take place
effectively. Money for computerizations is usually a problem as is
training of personnel who have been used to the older system of paper
records. Unless the use is computer savvy, transference of paper
records to electronic formats may prove impossible. Finally, time is an
issue. The backlog of old paper records is so much that there is a need
to employ temporary staff just to handle it. Even as others needs to be
brought up to speed to handle the existing and oncoming case loads.
Be that as it may, there is no denying that in today’s world,
when everything has been computerized, it is indeed time for electronic
medical records as well.
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A Healthy Dose of Good Advice
