The Electronic Health Record: Is It Worth It?

The US has had a plan to implement The Electronic Health Record (EHR), which is the way to record patient information by digitizing, standardizing, and computerizing it, into entire hospitals in the state for a long time. According to the article "will Electronic Medical Records Improve Health Care?" in scientific American, only 10% of hospitals in the US are using EHR. In early 2009, 19$ billion of economic stimulus package was passed by the Obama administration. This provides an incentive for hospitals or healthcare facilities to adopt an EHR in order to make healthcare service more efficient in many ways. EHR improves doctors to make better decisions that are based on easy-to-access information of patients, medical records of each patient that can be link together, and family history information that doctors can diagnose the potential of genetic illnesses. More than that, a time for doctors to find or ask such information from patient is reduced, and the information is more accurate. Most of all, D'Avolio suggested that recorded information must not be just information that store in unstructured formats which is impossible by using information technology for generating trends or statistical studies, EHR will be useless if it just automate the operation work and cannot achieve anything else.

However there are many arguments about installing EHR. The cost of implementing is the major factor. Ashish Jha, associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard School of Public Health, made a point that hospitals have to spend 20$ million to 200$ million to deploy EHR in their infrastructure. Typically, networks and computers in hospitals are manufactured by different vendors and are not connected together, which mean there is no standard for communicating and hard to organize. Another problem is that doctor and staff in the hospital themselves find a hard time to adapt from old-fashion work- paper- to a new one, and there must be a lot of training cost incurred.

I’m surprised that physicians or staffs don’t want to change the way they work just because they already get used to the current way. It’s not just healthcare industry that has to adopt IT in improvement. Most industries have already changed from paper-based work to IT-based work, and their workers have to adapt themselves to it altogether. It’s true that there will be slow starts. But consequences that come after would contribute to their industries greatly. Although IT and its infrastructure are expensive, in a long term those industries can save more money due to reducing of workload, and outcomes of their work will be more productive.

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References
Greenemeier L.(2009).Will electronic medical records improve health care?. Scientific American. Retrieved December 2, 2009 from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=electronic-health-records