Introduction
What is an Electronic Health Record?
An Electronic Health Record is a record of a person's critical medical history in electronic format. (Stenberg College, 2018.) This record contains information pertaining to a patient's health status, such as the medical procedures they have had and the respective results, their medications and allergy history, and so on.
With measures to generate and store information electronically on a steady rise, the importance of maintaining electronic records and keeping them as accessible as they are secure is all the more relevant today.
Evaluation
What are the benefits of Electronic Health Records?
The benefits include:
- Security
- Accessibility
- Consistency
- Ease of locating areas of concern
- Ease of auditing
Because of the format these records, they provide more options for security measures than physical paper records. For example, whereas paper health records can only be stored in a file cabinet secured by only a key that can potentially be stolen and used by unauthorized personnel to access sensitive information, Electronic Health Records can be stored in a remote location that can be accessed only by authorized personnel with an approved password, or through some other means that would be difficult for unauthorized persons to pass through.
Despite the increased security that comes with health records being in electronic format, they are also more easy to access by the authorized persons. Since these records are stored virtually, they can be accessed remotely and quickly if needed. Unlike paper health records that need to be physically handled and transported with each use - increasing the risk of unauthorized access - Electronic Health Records need not be on one's 'person' and are therefore both more secure and more portable.
One more useful feature that Electronic Health Records is their ability to accommodate a sort of 'red flags' feature. What this means is that a computer or software can run a scan of the Electronic Health Record to quickly pinpoint and identify areas of concern with regards to a person's record. For example, with the appropriate software to run keyword searches, it becomes much more efficient to find out if a person has any underlying health conditions that may be serious or life-threatening. With paper records, a person must manually obtain the record and run a search for key words by hand, a much slower process that is also prone to information being misunderstood or even missed by a manual check.
What are EMRs and how do they relate to EHRs?
An Electronic Medical Record or EMR, is similar to an Electronic Health Record but with some key differences. One key factor that sets the two apart is that while EHRs are designed to be shared between authorized service providers or organizations, while an EMR is not. ("Differences Between EHR and EMR", n.d.) In other words, an Electronic Health Record can be accessed by Organizations A, B, C (provided they are authorized to), while an EMR can be accessed only by whichever organization it originated from.
Another way to differentiate between EMRs and EHRs is that an EMR takes a narrower look at a patient's medical history while an EHR has a wider and more comprehensive look at the same patient's history. Think of them like this: an EMR is like a picture that takes only a picture of a person's face, while an EHR takes a full-body picture of the same person.
Credits
References:
Differences Between EHR and EMR. Retrieved December 19, 2918, from https://www.usfhealthonline.com/resources/key-concepts/ehr-vs-emr/
Stenberg College. (2018). Lecture 3: Electronic Health Records [Video]. Retrieved December 19, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Q24nBZWOA&list=PLibPw5ZYJHDTl_dWST_dT…