Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Getting information when you want it

Wouldn’t it be great if you could access a patient’s information remotely, say if you attend an out-of-town conference? Or, perhaps you need to quickly communicate medical history to a pharmacist to confirm accurate medication dosing. What if you wanted the latest lab results, but you can’t seem to get through the intricacies of the lab’s phone system in less than 30 minutes? Remember the last time you were on-call and received that annoying page at midnight? Wouldn’t it be great to have access to your patient’s information from your home so you could easily make the right clinical decision and then get back to bed? No matter the situation, your time is valuable, and you need patient information at your fingertips. EHR does that. You can pull patient info, set up instant messaging or e-mail alerts, and even (with some systems) get remote access to patient records from a PDA or smartphone device. Now that’s something your musty old paper files can’t do.

Looking at the Business Side of EHRs

Consider how, beyond improved patient care and better use of physical space, an EHR system will benefit you and your staff. The EHR is an all-encompassing entity that affects everything from scheduling and billing to workflow and patient communication. To think in a big picture sort of way, you need to consider three things: your office infrastructure and the viability of adding an EHR to the mix; the actual costs and benefits of adopting a paperless system; ...