Electronic Medical Records Here to Stay?

Healthcare was given a boost in the last few years when electronic medical records worked their way into a host of medical offices. One of the companies servicing this form of medical record is Datamonitor, which expects to grow to $13 billion by 2012, an overall annual growth rate of 23.8 percent. Electronic medical records documents patients’ medical histories, symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, etc. They also include the financial, administrative, research and educational aspects of patient care electronically stored in a computer database.

Under ideal circumstances, the EHR or electronic health record end users will include the various providers, ancillary departments like X-ray, laboratory and pharmacies, and patients (through a personal health record portal. Payers and public health departments, as well as researchers will have limited access to medical records. Some will have access only to those parts for which they have authorized access. It is planned that EHRs will one day be connected worldwide.

Technologies like Electronic Health Records are very difficult to adopt, primarily due to the high cost of starting up such programs. Providers are very skeptical about changing the way they’ve done things and there is fragmentation within the healthcare community with multiple vendors of EHR making interoperator use complicated.

EHRs, however, are likely to become the mainstay of healthcare organizations in the future. This will allow healthcare to become more proactive, informed and helpful to patients. The quality of healthcare will improve, the information available to clinicians will increase and the speed at which collaboration of patient care, public health surveillance and medical research will be nearly instantaneous.