Electronic Medical Record Systems: Do They Really Help?

By Author: DeeAnn
Total Articles: 6
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Keeping track of patients' records has always been one of the most important administrative tasks in any hospital or medical facility. Every diagnosis of every patient who has sought medical assistance must be kept as accurate as possible if doctors are to provide the best medical care to their patients. Any piece of information that is incorrectly entered into the patient's records can lead to catastrophic results.
Doctors and physicians have traditionally hand-written or verbally communicated orders for patient care. These orders are then transcribed by various individuals such as unit clerks, nurses, and ancillary staff before being carried out. Reports or notes written by hand, manual order entry, non-standard abbreviations and poor legibility lead to errors and injuries to patients.
Prescribing errors are the largest identifiable source of preventable hospital medical errors. It is estimated that a hospitalized patient is exposed to a medication error each day of his or her stay. Computerized physician order entry and the use of electronic health records can reduce the medication error rate significantly and ...
... prevent errors that have serious potential patient harm.
Electronic prescribing systems can provide automatic dosing alerts, such as letting the user know that the dose is too high and thus dangerous, and interaction checking that tells the user that two medicines ordered taken together can cause health problems. In this way, specialists in pharmacy work with the medical and nursing staffs at hospitals to improve the safety and effectiveness of medication use by utilizing computerized physician order entry systems and
electronic health records.
Electronic health records, or electronic medical record systems, pose new forms of potential problems. While the new order entry system boasts of efficiency by eliminating problems with illegible writing and non-standardized acronyms, it also proves to be cumbersome and difficult to navigate through.
Physicians have also complained that it is difficult to enter unconventional order data, such as patient-specific concerns like requests for softer pillows. Because the physicians' orders are processed electronically, it is difficult to tell whether they're being followed up on or not. These are some factors that need to be considered during the development of future electronic medical record systems.