Benefits of the Electronic Medical Records for Patients and Providers - Essay Example

"Benefits of the Electronic Medical Records for Patients and Providers" is an outstanding example of a paper on the health system
There are benefits that are generated by electronic medical records, both to the patients as well as to the healthcare provider. This paper provides some of the benefits that are brought by it, both to the healthcare providers and to the patient besides outlining some of the disadvantages of it.

Benefits to healthcare organizations

Better decisions are made when medical records are done electronically and besides, there will be more coordination of services with EHRs. Therefore, complete information of patients will be available and besides, healthcare providers will improve their capacity to come up with highly informed treatment decisions; moreover, these decisions will be made faster and safer.

EHRs make it very easy to use and to share information and hence it makes it very easy for the providers of health care to manage patient care. Therefore, fully functional as well as exchangeable EHRs cannot be compared with paperwork.  Besides, it increases the participation of patients as far as their healthcare is concerned and besides, it enhances the correctness of diagnoses as well as health outcomes. Moreover, it should be noted that EHRs also enhances the coordination of healthcare, and besides, it enhances the efficiencies of healthcare besides saving cost. In addition, electronic medical records save time because it will be very easy to access the records. Occasionally, it can be beneficial than when an emergency takes place or when emergent decisions are being made.

Benefits to patients

As noted, EHRs benefits organizations largely; therefore, it should be noted that it has several benefits to patients as well. In addition, it should be noted that besides efficiency, there are several other benefits of EHRs. Moreover, individual patients are capable of accessing better care easily and safely since it will be very easy to share records. Besides, significant information like medical conditions, type of blood, prescribed drugs, as well as other medical history aspects can easily be assessed (Wang S.J., et al, 2003).  

With electronic medical records, the time of patients will also be saved. For instance, the healthcare provider will have the medical information of the patient and therefore, the patient will not be asked his or her medical history since it is already present. Very little information like the name of the patient or given codes will be needed after which all information will be accessed by the medical staff.

The electronic medical record is beneficial to patients whose conditions are so worse that they cannot talk. In such a case, their records will be available electronically and it will be very easy to handle them. In addition, it should be noted that EHRs enhance the correctness of diagnoses as well as health outcomes; moreover, this is beneficial to patients (Hillestad, R., et al, 2005).

Disadvantages

Besides the advantages, there are disadvantages that are brought about by electronic data records. For instance, startup costs are usually very excessive (Dick, Steen, and Detmer, 1997). Secondly, EHR will require specialized learning by the personnel involved and training may not be very cheap for healthcare professionals. EHR also requires data entry skills, in which healthcare professionals may not be very efficient.

Confidentiality, as well as security issues, also arise with EHR; therefore, patients may feel that their confidential information may not be handled with care. Therefore, health care practitioners, when handling patients’ information should employ security technologies (Dick, Steen, and Detmer, 1997). The other big problem is its implementation, as there may be diverse visions. During the implementation, there may be inconsistent terminology indexing as well as system architecture and this may be a huge problem during implementation.

Conclusion

There are several benefits as well as demerits of electronic health records and this paper has noted them. There is a need for healthcare organizations to weigh these advantages as well as disadvantages before implementing electronic health records.