Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHR) The concept of an EHR is still at its embryonic stage. It is a warehouse of secure, methodical & digitized health information about individuals, such as demographics, laboratory test results, medication history, invoicing, either in comprehensive or summarized form. Of late, ESRs have become an integral part of computerized order-entry & patient-tracking system, giving full-fledged access to legible & longitudinal records of patient care across various healthcare organizations & enterprises. An EHR helps assuage patients’ sufferings & subsequent, financial loss by preventing medical errors & facilitat ing quality analysis. Moreover, it endows health-care workers with decision support, while giving them unprecedented access to current best practices in medicine & huge volumes of clinical data for research & educational purposes. This automatically paves the way for further healthcare improvements & saves misutilization of resources. The EHRs are intended to enhance care co-ordination, tone down health-related discrepancies & sensitize the mass about potential health problems & the ways to fight them. It encourages active participation of patients & their families, while guarantying privacy & confidentiality of all the sensitive online data about them. EHRs came into being, many moons back, when Hippocrates generated the first medical record in the fifth century BC, with the intention of gaining a clear understanding about the routes & probable causes of certain diseases. Although his goals are still intact, modern EHRs are way more than that. They can provide interactive alerts to clinicians, customized order sets & many more, which cannot be, otherwise, performed by their paper counterparts. Most commercial EHRs harmoniously blend data from various auxiliary services, including pharmacy, radiology & laboratory, with core clinical data, pertaining to nursing plans, physician orders, into a concrete whole. However, an EHR is not without its flipsides. It can, sometimes, be an exorbitant affair. EHRs cannot be implemented, unless the US Government coughs up enough money to install them. Infact, in a 2006 survey, lack of adequate funding, as reported by 729 health care providers, was considered as the most significant barrier to adopting electronic records. It is estimated that buying and setting up an EHR will cost over $32,000 per physician. Moreover, its software system has to be upgradated on a regular basis & the company has to splash a substantial amount of money on staff training, associated with EHRs. For more information please visit our website: http://www.sunknowledge.com/

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