Electronic health record - Essay Example

Although transfer of records into electronic forms began in 1960s, however, since last few years, governments and healthcare organizations are putting efforts to ensure a standardized implementation of electronic health records that has resulted in debates and discussions regarding their benefits and possibilities. In this regard, this paper is an attempt to contribute in the same stream that will include discussion on electronic health records. Specifically, analysis (Green & Bowie, pp. 107-116) has indicated that a number of healthcare organizations have records of their patients in electronic form; however, experts have identified that few specific components should be present, in order to provide a legal status to the EHR, and thus, absence of any essential component may result in its illegality.

In this regard, experts believe that it calls for an initiative on national or state level to promote such practice of maintaining electronic health records that although will be a challenging process but will result in long-term benefits. However, studies (Green & Bowie, pp. . Thus, it is imperative that authorities should take steps to provide awareness to stakeholders regarding the importance of EHR in research, legal, and financial matters besides its significance in patient care. In other words, there is a need for healthcare organizations to acquire an understanding of EHR as an opportunity rather than a requisite to enhance quality of care.

In particular, provision of inclusive, consistent, important, and reachable information is one of the major factors of success in healthcare industry, and EHR can play a pivotal role in allowing the organizations to fulfill this requisite in their capacities (Busch, pp. 23-46). In addition, it is observation that EHR indicates huge potential for organizational savings and experts have already indicated its potential for reducing or even eliminating inefficiency on the workplace level, as studies have indicated a huge number of issues due to dependence of clinicians on paper-based health records.

However, as paper-based health record maintenance has benefits and loopholes, it is the same in case of EHR. The major issue in transitioning from manual to electronic is lack of awareness, especially technological awareness that is the foremost requisite for EHR that has been the major barrier in successful transition to EHR automated environment. Reports have pointed out that electronic health record systems require continued updating in terms of its technology, as well as in terms of its users’ awareness.

However, besides this barrier, EHR has a number of different benefits that dominate it over manual health records. In case of ‘manual health record’, healthcare organizations and providers