Electronic Medical Records

In order to advance in the healthcare industry, all healthcare professionals have to take the initiative to move along with the changes. Every day is a new beginning to a medical achievement, and yet, with it are the challenges of approval and acceptances to these new innovative ideas. One such idea, being the standardization of electronic medical records, has led many physicians to oppose it and stay stuck in their old ways. However, by not moving forward with these electronic medical records, we have prevented the healthcare system from being in sync with one another. The standardization of electronic medical records must be enforced in the Commonwealth in order to evolve our system into one that information can be easily exchanged without

If the Commonwealth decided to make the proposal to standardize EMRs, the standards would pave way for interoperability, which could eliminate issues such as the inadequate quality of healthcare. Furthermore, patients would gain the ability to visit any healthcare facility and have their medical record easily accessible by the physician because they would all be digitally transmitted to them. “To take advantage of these developments and to stimulate additional improvements in clinical data exchange, policies should hasten the creation of communitywide data exchange systems that allow clinicians to view all of their patients’ data, regardless of provider and care site.”(Miller & Sim, 2004) Ultimately, this would allow doctor visits to be more efficient and quick due to the ability to have such access to the patient’s medical histories. The physician would then be able to provide outstanding healthcare services since he will be able to see all of the patient’s health

Some examples of the many benefits to EMRs are secure messaging, computerized physician order entry, and patient directed functionality. Secure messaging allows physicians to communicate with one another enabling them to transmit patient data to improve care coordination. Computerized physician order entry, abbreviated as CPOE, reduces medical and prescription errors. “CPOE makes information available to physicians at the time they enter an order— for example, warning about potential interactions with a patient’s other drugs. Once the order has been entered, the system can track the steps involved in executing the order, providing an additional mechanism for identifying and eliminating errors.”(Hillestad et al., 2005) A benefit that is more directed towards the patient’s side of the spectrum is patient directed functionality. It provides patients with the ability to use their own computer to schedule visits, send secure e-mail messages to providers, order medications, access their charts, and obtain more individualized educational patient care information, which overall improves the quality of healthcare. However, the main drawbacks are due to the lack of compliance from physicians and high initial costs. Many healthcare facilities and professionals find that changing their methods are unappealing because they would have to train their employees as well as finance the equipment necessary, which can