Doctors using electronic medical records

Icarus
Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:28:15 +0000

I have worked with sensitive confidential medical records. The possibilities for breach are pretty sobering even with manual systems. When they’re all digitized, the possibilities for breach become sad and likely. Yes, there are some advantages, but we are giving up a lot.



Personally, I think an entirely digitized medical record is better for security and confidentiality overall. With paper records, anyone with physical access to the folder (and you’ve all seen the stacks and stacks of records behind the desk at your doctors office) can see, edit, destroy, etc. the record and there will be no record (no pun intended) of that. Also, paper records are easier to lose and are in general a bigger pain to look through, esp when a patient is elderly and/or has a ton of comorbidities. An EMR is encrypted, accessible from anywhere the provider is, and every single access or edit to your record is logged. That being said, any system is only as good as its weakest link, and for the EMR that is the password and practices of the users - but this can be taken care of with password requirements and automatic log-off, etc.



Stand up, check my pulse, sit down, enter data. Stand up, check my carotid, sit down, enter data. Stand up …



As for this and other posts like it, well… those physicians just aren’t using the EMR properly. And that’s perfectly understandable if the physician is older, not used to using computers, or just is new to the whole EMR game. Did those physicians sit there and enter every finding individually like that when they were using paper charts? Probably not, so why are they doing it with EMRs? Personally, I have no problem taking a history/physical without ever touching the computer and then leaving the room to create the record - and it’s much faster than if I wrote it. But it’s nice to have a computer in the room to be able to show patient’s their lab results or to pull up their CT or X-ray and go through it with them. Also, prescriptions can be sent immediately to the patient’s pharmacy, orders sent to the hospital, etc.

And re: being data entry clerks, what do you think physicians were before EMRs came around? All that information still had to be logged somewhere (i.e. a paper record). Personally, I can type much faster than I can write - which brings me to another benefit of EMRs - they are always perfectly legible. I have seen so many medical records where I doubt even the person who wrote them could figure out what is written. EMRs take care of that problem completely.

Obviously, I am a huge fan of EMR’s. They really take care of a lot of issues with paper charts. Not saying there aren’t downsides, but the benefits far outweigh the problems.