Specialised patient care using electronic medical record

In the modern medical scenario healthcare practices has been evolving and always looking for better avenues to improve the overall well being of the patients. These days Information Technology (IT) has been helping healthcare stakeholders by offering ways and means to take their facilities to the next level.

In today’s world, physicians are looking for better options to improve their productivity, efficiency and improve the overall patient care. Physicians are also looking forward to attend to more patients without compromising on the quality.

In advanced countries, most of the physicians seek technological support to improve their patient care. In recent time, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) has proven as the revolutionary IT product for physicians to improve their overall patient experience and improve their healthcare practices. EMR adoption rate in developed countries is very high as compared with under developed countries as there are certain challenges that the doctors face.

Physician’s challenges in current scenario

Following are the typical challenges that physicians face in their healthcare practices:

• Patient records – Most of the records are maintained using papers, hence there are inherent road blocks in improving healthcare practices. Following are few of them :

1. Searching for the records is a time consuming process
2. Records are merely on papers therefore physicians are unable to use the data out of it
3. Records are non-transferable to other physicians
4. No clear process to track patient history
5. No use of effective note/ patient records
6. Records are difficult to digitise

• Patient education – To improve patient care one of the important steps needed is to improve patient’s awareness and educate the patient as much as possible. However, with the present arrangements, it is not possible to do the same successfully.
• Record availability with patient – Most of the time patient needs the critical clinical records to refer to other physicians or to share with their family members; however, with the current manual system it is not possible to make these records available with the patients.
• Patient appointment – With the current manual system it is hard to change / reschedule or cancel the appointment and use the available slot for other patients. It is achievable to certain extent but surely challenging for the staffs to manage the patient appointment list.
• Handwritten prescription – There are chances that handwritten notes might be incorrectly deciphered and pharmacy takes the call on what the medicine should be. A few NGO’s have also suggested ways to improve handwritten prescriptions by writing in capital letters.
• Practice management – With the manual system in place, physicians spent most of the time in managing the practice and hence very little time to spent on strategising on how to improve the patient care.

Selecting right EMR software for healthcare practice

The right EMR software must have the following features:

• Certified as per Government norms
• Electronic patient appointment features
• ePrescription
• Practice management
• Critical notes for patient
• Workflow as per physician need
• Compliance reporting
• Store/ retrieve patient records
• Patient education
• Online patient portal
• Laboratory/ Pathology records
• Health Information Exchange (HIE)

Conclusion

For advanced patient care physicians can take help of IT and adopt reliable, efficient and best software which will improve the productivity and quality of their practice. This will also benefit the patients and make their visit to the doctor pleasurable.