Electronic Medical Record (EMR) - Essay Example

In each step of transition, each stakeholder is considered to ensure that each need is addressed at optimum levels. These stakeholders primarily consist of the health care providers and recipient-patients. The medical industry is just one of those industries who capitalize in human resource and invest on meeting human needs. Thus, it is not surprising to find this industry integrating well with its technological advances the human factors -- providers and patients. A particular technological advancement that is taking its slow yet comprehensive steps in the health care industry is the Electronic Medical Record or EMR.

Basically, this type of information-capture is the digitized copy of the tangible and printed medical reports traditionally used by the healthcare providers. Pressing needs in the industry’s record-keeping component and the desire for higher operational efficiencies, as well as the great potential of addressing these through the EMR had led to the scrutinizing and inevitable debate of this technology’s advantages and disadvantages. Disadvantages A primary disadvantage of most technological advancement, and where EMR is not an exception, is its reliance to energy (i.e., electricity).

Next in line of these primary drawbacks is the slow system run, as well as hardware issues (Wager, Lee, White, Ward, & Ornstein, 2000). The disadvantages of EMR lie on the delays and possible discrepancies (occurring during delay or information transfer from paper to a computer) that providers have to face on instances of energy disruption, software, or hardware malfunction. Indeed, a physician assistant once remarked, "everything comes to a screeching halt when the system is down. You have to, all of a sudden, remember how to handwrite prescriptions” (Wager et al.

, 2000, Results section, para. 9). The assistant’s statement presented another learning deficiency that once providers get to rely too much on the EMR, they became less adept to the simple, fundamentals of the manual record keeping. The impact of these disadvantages to the providers maybe a bit similar to the patients. If these disadvantages occur temporarily, then its impact to patients is limited. However, in the long run and in total count, these disadvantages may transform into huge losses in the supposedly saved costs of utilizing EMRs.

Advantages The advantages of the EMR evidently lie on the justification of its invention in the first place. Its existence was meant to aid the health care industry in advancing its record-keeping component. Moreover, EMR was envisioned to mobilize a lot of other medical service transactions through the unified integration of transitory information and multiple department access (which have to be granted to make this integration possible). Mitchell and Haroun (2011) enumerated EMR’s advantages: 1) its systems-inclusion capability, which does the ‘coordinating’ function for the different departmental services; and 2) its cautionary and informativity feature, which promote the utilization of a uniform, patient-and-provider reference to medication and treatment protocol.

Both of these advantages serve to address the flexible and real-time integration needed to speed the flow of the healthcare service transactions and synchronize with it the organized and useful output of patient data. Consequently, these concerns that used