An electronic medical record (EMR) has a number of advantages over a paper one. As all information migrates to digital forms, medical providers are discovering that EMR software allows their practices operate more smoothly and helps them provide better patient care. Here are just a few advantages of electronic medical records.
Ease of Preservation
Paper records are difficult to protect. In the event of a fire, flood or other disaster years of patient histories can be lost. Ideally records could be photocopied and stored offsite in fireproof safes, but realistically this is not cost effective.
An electronic medical record is backed up like any other computer file. Duplicates can be made in seconds. The entire database can be backed up onto tapes or external hard drives and stored offsite. They take up less room than paper records thus incur lower storage costs. Even better, the database can be backed up online to remote servers located anywhere in the world. Transmitted and stored under encrypted protocols, electronic records are safer than paper when it comes to protection against unauthorized intrusion.
Searchable Data
Medical providers recognize the benefit of being able to track trends among patient complaints. This can give them early warning of a disease outbreak or give evidence of environmental contamination or other issues. With paper records, these trends are very difficult to spot. Unless a physician pores over the records one by one, or has a phenomenal memory, crises may go undetected until too late.
Doctors can search through electronic medical records in seconds or minutes depending on the size of the database. They can look for specific patterns or set up automatic alerts for unusual trends. One goal of the electronic medical record movement is to set up national or global databases to allow organizations such as the CDC or WHO to track pandemics as they move through populations.
Easy Cooperation with Other Agencies
Sharing data among different providers can be a problem. Each one has their own filing system and paperwork. This can create problems when, for example, a patient receives prescriptions from different doctors that have adverse interactions.
When providers use the same format of electronic medical record, large scale databases can be created that show patient history across an entire medical system. These efforts are already common in hospital systems where a doctor can pull up notes or lab tests from another physician to get a complete picture of a patient.
Eventually, these databases may span different hospital systems, cities, states and countries so any qualified medical provider can see a comprehensive history on a patient. Imagine a system where a patient can be hundreds of miles from home and yet in an emergency all his medical information is available.
Some of these ideas are still years or decades away, but the evolution to digital media is well on its way and will only grow in the future.
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