Question

How Electronic Medical Records (EMR) improve quality of care?. And, What are the factors affecting patients' use of personal health records?.

Answer 1

EMR( ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS) IMPROVES QUALITY OF CARE :-

✓It helps the healthcare workers in providing the information in formats that were not possible with paper charts.

So, the primary care providers can view and print graphs of values such as weight, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure, tracking changes over time.

It also improves attainment of chronic disease management, prevention, and screening targets.

✓It alerts to remind providers when certain prevention and screening maneuvers are due or out of the date.

✓It also improves communication and relationships between family physicians and their multidisciplinary team members.

✓The prescriptions are in a clear and in structured format, which reduces the medical errors in prescribing.

✓It also improves the communication with patients through the use of patient portals and personal health records.

✓It improves Patient Safety and Satisfaction :-

EMR improve communication between patients and physicians, improve efficiency and promote better satisfaction level among the patients.

Features like e-prescribing - allow patients to receive their prescriptions online in an easy and accessible format.

✓It Simplifies the Workflows:-

Patients who have a complex medical history or suffering from chronic diseases would have plenty of records. EMR records would allow physicians and clinicians to review a comprehensive file which would clearly identify all the aspects involved in a patient’s treatment plan.

✓It improves clinical research quality.

✓Patients Can Better Manage the Preventable Diseases through EMR.

✓Highly efficient and cost effective

EMR technology is popular to enable more efficient and accurate patient visits, eliminating duplicate testing by facilitating the easier documentation. These important aspects are known to increase cost savings meant for physicians and hospitals, and for patients also.

Factors affecting patient's use of personal health records:-

As thePHRs( Personal Health Records) are Web-based. So, use of a PHR to perform health management tasks requires the user to have computer and Internet skills. Thus, simply accessing a PHR can be challenging for consumer groups with limited Internet skills, such as many old age peoples.

*Because of limited computer and Internet experience the old age peoples have difficult to access PHRs.

* PHR using could be particularly challenging for many older adults because of the wide range of cognitive abilities that may be required for performance of health management tasks.

*Health literacy skills i.e “degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decision" are also required for successful use of a PHRs.