Electronic Health Record - Assignment Example

Electronic Health RecordElectronic Health Record (EHR) is an evolving system which focuses on the collecting, updating, retrieving and retention of medical records of an individual person, population or a specific group. These health care systems are recorded in a digital format and present information when required in a theoretical form. It uses various kinds of different personal data and transforms it into useful information for health practitioners, consultants, laboratories, hospitals and research institutes.

EHR processes the information which it receives from the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) (Gunter & Terry, 2005).There are various types of support systems that are available (or soon will be available) in the health care system; each one has its own attributes and characteristics. OpenMRSIt is an open source of information on health care (especially HIV) in developing countries of Africa. It is based on the information of various records updated in the EMR which are then refined and analyzed in the EHR.

This system is state of the art technology. It covers almost every feature that would help to maintain the record of any person or country. It is also a user friendly system, which allows a user to freely roam about in various interfaces. Flexibility offered by this system is also another feature which makes it more desirable, medical support information could be access in the remotest of the geographical regions (Mamlin et al., 2006).The start-up, maintenance and implementation cost of this product can be troublesome.

Start-up and implementation cost is quite high and it requires huge sums of money in the starting phase, but with the passage of time it becomes cheaper as the maintenance cost is not that high, which are also some of its biggest demerits.‘Concept Dictionary’ is the idea that OpenMRS is based on. The idea is to store useful medical information such as clinical findings, lab results and even the socio economic data. The concept is extremely successful as it becomes relatively easy to update the data set if new disease is added, there is no need for modification, plus sharing of this medical information is also very convenient.

The modular construction of OpenMRS is the real benefit that sets it apart from other ambulatory EHR devices. Its ease of use also includes the facility of putting it on a single lap top or on a large server and works with all major operating systems like Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. eMIXeMIX stands for Electronic Medical Information Exchange and is based on the concept of cloud-computing (Leslie, 2012), where one could manage, retrieve and update information in a server with-out actually connecting with it, through the means of internet or web based tools and application.

eMIX is developed to address the challenge of sharing the medical images from one interface to another, while they are not on the same network of server. This is one of the most important advantages of eMIX as it could be operated by a remote user, who just only needs a broadband connection in order to retrieve/share a medical image. Another fundamental advantage of eMIX is its affordability, it does not require highly technical hardware or software, the start-up, maintenance and implementation costs are minimal and affordable.

List of ReferencesGunter, T., & Terry, N. (2005). The emergence of national electronic health record architectures in the United States and Australia: Models, costs, and questions. J Med Internet Res, 7(1), e3. doi: 10.2196/jmir.7.1.e3Leslie, K. (2012, August 27). At vmworld, eMIX executive to discuss impact of cloud-based medical data exchange. Retrieved from http://www.emix.com/en/component/k2/item/160-at-vmworld-emix-executive-to-discuss-impact-of-cloud-based-medical-data-exchangeMamlin, B.

, Biondich, P., Wolfe, B., Fraser, H., Jazayeri, D., Miranda, J., Allen, C., & Tierney, W. (2006). Cooking up an open source emr for developing countries: Openmrs - a recipe for successful collaboration. Pub Med, 529-33. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17238397