December 22, 2014
HCS/212
Healthcare technologies- EMR
Electronic medical records is great part of our healthcare system in current time. I have been a medical assistant for the past 4 years and in that short time frame medical records have changed drastically. The company I am working for now started on traditional paper charting which is a hassle. You can imagine a big room filled with charts and piles and piles of paper. We are slowly transferring over to electronic medical records and there is such a big difference in work flow. The office is much cleaner and any of the paperwork you might need is all in your computer system. Everything is at a click away so patient visits don’t take as long as they used to due to the efficiency of electronic medical records.
Today I read an article named Patient perception of electronic medical records use and ratings of quality care. I chose this article to be part of this paper because it speaks about how quality of care does not change due to using electronic medical records. The way a provider stores your information is not going to change the way your care is given but it will keep you more secure. By having your complete medical file on a computerized system your care will be safe. Your records will not be laying around the office because they will be all in one database that only healthcare professionals can get to.
Patient perception of electronic medical records use and ratings of quality care was a great article because there was data collected from actual patients to see how many of them had providers that actually used a computerized or electronic medical records system to store their records. The poll also included a rating scale on their care to see if they felt that the care was better or worse with the system. They collected this poll via mail and they came to a conclusion that 86.99% of the patients that participated in the poll had a provider that used a computerized system to store patient information. The other 13.01% had a provider that was not involved in any kind of EMR system. Many medical facilities are starting to transition into EMR systems like the company I work for also did. Solo practitioners are on the lower end of the scale of adopting EMR systems at 29%. Bigger healthcare organizations are moving on to these items at a great rate with this increasing their practice size including both patients and employees. In this article they stated that in 2011 55% of practitioners were using EMR systems and in 2012 it increase at a rapid rate to an estimated 69%.
Electronic Medical records has changed healthcare so much is the past years and it will continue to. Using EMR systems makes it secure for healthcare professionals to keep track of their patients at a click of the fingertip. They can pull up anything on anyone that they have treat and even add. I believe that in a few years the EMR systems that we have now will be more advanced. Everything will be able to be dictated in to the computer. All of the doctors notes and even some of the patient information that the patient provided at the time of the visit. There will be no need to type of dictate at time of the visit. Diagnosis will be imputed and maybe it will even recommend certain studies for the patient to have for the certain complaints that they have.