Healthcare is a subject that affects everyone. Therefore, the implementation of electronic medical records and electronic prescriptions should be of interest to the general population.
The use of EMR and e-prescriptions could not only improve clinical decision-making, save lives, and decrease mortality rates, it also could save medical practitioners invaluable time and money.
The American Medical Association (AMA), for example, has attributed “adverse drug events” to 2.1 million injuries and 100,000 deaths every year, equivalent to two 737s crashing every day. At a hospital in California, the leading state in EMR and e-prescriptions in the US, an electronic prescribing study showed that the mean monthly adjusted mortality rate decreased by 20 percent after the implementation of a computerized physician order entry system.
One possible reason California is leading the US in EMR adoption is its earthquake-prone geography. This susceptibility to natural disaster may lead to an awareness of the value of making patient data available online. By digitizing patient records, EMR allows those records to be backed up and stored on a reliable system, protecting the data from disasters that can cause valuable financial and data loss.
EMR also saves on the costs of transcribing records; and transcription errors drop to nil with EMR adoption, saving considerable sums of money.
According to a document from the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society, the Heritage Behavioral Health Center Inc. in Decatur, Ill., saved more than $200,000 on transcription and documentation costs. And the University of Illinois “relocated $1.2 million of nurse time from manual documentation tasks to direct delivery of patient care.”
A report by the AMA states that in 1 of 7 primary care visits, some important medical data is missing -- e.g., a laboratory result, a letter from a consultant, a radiology report, a hospital history, or a physical examination record. This problem of missing medical information can be alleviated by the implementation of EMR, with a consequent benefit in the communication and relationship of the patient to the physician. Moreover, the communication problems among specialists and primary care physicians, laboratories, and hospitals or nursing homes also can be greatly improved, assuring better and safer care of the patient.
Despite its benefits, resistance to EMR remains. Looking back in history, it is clear that the human tendency is to be hesitant about new technologies or new treatments. It is about time this changed by understanding the clinical and financial benefits that EMR acceptance and adoption presents for all patients. Public consensus will encourage physicians to integrate EMR into their practices.
The medical and financial benefits of EMR are hard to ignore. But the best benefit of EMR is to provide better patient care and quality of medical practice. Awareness of the need for faster adoption and use of EMR has to be everyone’s responsibility.
