Electronic Health Records for Everyone
64Healthcare reforms are making inroads and it is just a matter of time before the overhaul takes place. Along with policy changes, Healthcare reform will include an updated EHR and PHR policies. Personal Health Records and Electronic Health Records are 2 different things and this articles attempts to explain EHR.
An Electronic Health Record (EHR) refers to an individual patient's medical record in digital format. Electronic health record systems co-ordinate the storage and retrieval of individual records with the aid of computers. EHRs are usually accessed on a computer, often over a network. It may be made up of electronic medical records (EMRs) from many locations and/or sources. A variety of types of healthcare-related information may be stored and accessed in this way.
What are Personal Health Records then?
In general, a Personal Health Record (PHR) is controlled by the
individual, and can be shared with others, including caregivers, family
members and providers. This is different from a provider's electronic
health record, which is controlled by the provider just as paper
medical records are today. Ideally, a Personal Health Record will have
a fairly complete summary of an individual's health and medical history
based on data from many sources, including information entered by the
individual (allergies, over the counter medications, family history,
etc).For more details on PHR, refer to the article below -
How to choose a Personal Health Record software
PHR is primarily used and controlled by patients while EHRs are meant for health care providers, hospitals and doctors. Both are software formats and there are hundreds are vendors our there providing tools and technology. PMS (Practice Management Software) is also referred to as EHR sometimes, but PMS is generally used in physician's office that employs fewer people. Big hospitals use more sophisticated software.
EHR tools provides several tools to physicians which include the following
- Patient lookup and management of personalized patient lists
- Problem list management
- Health maintenance and disease state management reminders
- Clinical decision support
Advantages of Electronic Health Records compared to traditional paper documents:
Your health records may be on the physical media such as film (X-rays), paper, or photographs, often of different sizes and shapes. As you can imagine, physical storage of documents is problematic and can be lost due to theft, fire or simply mismanagement Also, not all document types fit in the same size folders or storage spaces. In the current global medical environment, patients are shopping for their procedures. Many international patients travel to US cities with academic research centers for specialty treatment or to participate in Clinical Trials. Coordinating these appointments via paper records is a time-consuming procedure and may violate the patient's HIPAA privacy. Physical records usually require significant amounts of space to store them. When physical records are no longer maintained, the large amounts of storage space are no longer required. Paper, film, and other expensive physical media usage is also reduced with electronic record storage.
The electronic records will be used to reduce costly medication errors, detect fraud and enable the use of systems to evaluate health conditions and warn patients and doctors of impending dangerous and more expensive problems. An electronic record is particularly valuable for older Americans because they tend to have much more complicated health challenges than younger people. Proportionately, more mistakes can be avoided, more lives saved and more bad outcomes avoided among older Americans in an intelligent health system than would be the case with the same number of young people.
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