Using physical folders and files, copying data and faxing reports is such a tenuous task and hard to keep them all up-to-date. But the health industry has been doing this for all these years.
The health industry always relies on old traditional methods when it comes to keeping patient records, patients’ medical history, and treatment analysis because they emphasise more on providing better service to patients.
Clearly changes have been seen over the past years, as the industry is growing and EHR(electronic health records) have come into the picture.
What Is an Electronic Health Record(EHR)?
EHR is an electronic, digital real-time record system of patient information. With these, hospital management can keep patient records in a digital format that is easily accessible anytime, very secure, and can be shared with other departments quickly.
An EHR contains important information such as patient details, patient medical history, treatment plans, allergies, blood and urine test results, and radiology images. Basically, it’s a digital copy of a patient's medical analysis.
Stats For Electronic Health Records
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Government took the initiative to improve the healthcare IT sector, and it increased the EHR market size to 62.5 Billion USD in 2022. It was estimated that the annual growth rate will be increased by 4.1% from 2023 to 2030.
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Also, the web-based Electronic Records improved at so much level over the last couple of years and generated higher revenue in the healthcare industry.
The Importance Of Electronic Health Records
Using electronic health records provides so many benefits to the medical management team and patients. Let’s know them;
1. Convenient for both Patient and Provider:
Electronic health records simplify the work and improve the convenience for both patients and medical authorities in the healthcare sector. As patients can access their reports and get the test results easily by sitting at home, they can be notified or alarmed by their medical reminders, which help both of them in making quick and right decisions at a time.
This also improves the availability of patients as they don’t need to come to the hospital again and again, but still they can discuss things with doctors like their future treatment, their continuity of medication, and their report.
2. Support in Decision-Making:
With EHR, doctors and medical authorities can make efficient decisions because these records can showcase their accurate analysis, alerts, aggregation, and potential forecasting of patient life.
By using EHR, doctors can make e-appointments with patients and easily communicate about how they are feeling at a certain moment, how their medication improves their health and other things to make better decisions.
3. Upgrade Security Level:
One of the main and crucial reasons, why it is so necessary to shift from manual handwritten reports to EHR is to control theft, unnecessary leaking of reports to anyone, and occurrence of circumstances that are beyond one’s control can destroy these paper and file systems of records. But using EHR improves security at so many levels - as these files and records are only shown to the users that are liable to it and not to anyone else.
4. Cost Saving:
Many healthcare management realise how using an e-record system helps in cost-saving and benefits them at so many levels. It decreases transportation costs, storage costs, reduces time for creating records manually, prevents errors, and provides high-quality systemized records to patients.
5. Reduce Paperwork:
EHR reduces the paperwork time for making reports, doing billing, requesting and processing forms, and providing e-prescribing. It also reduces the chances of errors that can be made with handwritten records and manual prescriptions.
EHR also minimises duplication of testing, as e-records keep information of all the tests that occur to the patient and their result, so it is easy to check and less likely to make mistakes.
6. Improve Coordination:
Using an EHR system improves coordination at a very high level, as it organises the information correctly and is authorised to only patients and healthcare management.
With EHR, it is easy for doctors to access patient details and also in the correct format, it helps doctors to recommend them to other specialists, do emergency treatment, available for them at a time, and remove unnecessary tests.
7. Increase Patient Involvement:
Patients can also assess their reports through the portal only, so they easily know what’s going on in their bodies and how they can push themselves to improve this condition. EHR also alerts them about appointments, fills in necessary forms, easy billing procedures, and helps them know their health status from time to time.
8. Internal Communication Become Easy:
Internal communication between staff and management of hospitals also improved with this facility, as now all the reliable staff can assess the full information of patients.
Final Verdict
In today’s time, it is very necessary to get up-to-date with technology and use it in your sector, as technology is only going to help us in so many wonderful ways. EHR is also like one of it, that helps health management in improving efficiency, productivity, and convenience.
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