Is Your Practice Following 21st Century’s Health Care Trends?

After a century of striving, after a year of debate, after a historic vote, health care reform is no longer an unmet promise. It is the law of the land. (Barack Obama)

Adoption of electronic health record is one of the set forth objectives for 21st Century’s Medical World; reveals a research report “Preparing For the 21st Century” by National Academy of Sciences.

Use of electronic health record, in the 21st century has become eminent. This role begins in the care process as the EHR provides patient information when needed to support clinical decisions and continues as a key information source for quality review and improvement.It can be linked to clinical-practice guidelines, clinical alerts, and up-to-date research findings to help patients and clinicians in making choices.

The goal is to revolutionize the way health care information is managed, producing better health outcomes and greater patient satisfaction. The widespread adoption of an EHR will reduce medical errors and would improve the quality of care for an estimated 3.6 million consumers.

Most medical records are still stored on paper, which means there are limitations in coordinating care, the ability to routinely measure quality, or reduce medical errors. As a result, providers and consumers generally lack the information they need about costs or quality to make informed care decisions.

Today there is consensus that wide-scale adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems will improve care, increase communication between parties, and enhance professionals’ ability to gather data to improve the effectiveness and efficiency throughout the healthcare system.

The use of an Electronic Health Record allows providers to have;

1. Accurate information about patient’s health that facilitates the providers to provide best health care both in routine and in emergency states.
2. Secure information exchange with other providers
3. Patient’s secured access to their own health record through internet, enabling them to make their record more accurate & all the time accessible.
4. Quick problem diagnosis, and reduced errors in patient’s record with detailed patients’ information available to the provider
5. No paper work, as a huge data is managed electronically making practice reduce their stationary cost
6. Potential Productivity and Financial Improvement
7. Increased formulary compliance and clearer prescriptions leading to fewer pharmacy call backs
8. population management and proactive patient reminders; improved reimbursement from payers due to EHR usage
9. Fewer repetitive, monotonous tasks
10. Enhanced intra-office communication
11. Improved provision of patient education materials

EHR in other words is a great technology revolution with enhanced patient care making providers’life easy. It has become a central nervous system of today’s medical world, a tool through which physicians can meet the needs of their office as well as of their patients.

In-short, EHR is all about enhancing quality of work and efficiency. The desired results of EHR usage can only be achieved when it would be adopted at a massive scale by the medical practices. The vast scale usage would further benefit in to quick access of medical survey reports. Practices and physicians should seriously concern the adoption of EHR to get benefited and transform their medical practice as per the norms of 21^st Century.