’A very efficient and simple EMR is an extremely integral part of the hospital infrastructure’
How have Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems evolved and revolutionised healthcare?
 |
|
Jay Mehta
|
A medical record is the most important account of information regarding the health and medical treatment of a patient – this is a well-known fact. How can we further utilise a medical record? This progressive thought has substantially evolved over the last few years, inspiring the medical fraternity to work on e-enablement in patient care – hence the emphasis on EMR. Digitisation of medical records through EMR has been further fuelled due to advances in research and technology:
- Hospitals use non-private information for a lot of research work
- Technology enables extraction and analysis of clinical information from medical records to further improve the quality of patient care
- Ability to forecast epidemic and take preventive measures
- Ability to refer to cases treated in the past and extract specific learnings from that
- Codification of diseases and diagnosis codes enables universal treatments of patients
- Promote the practice of evidence-based medicine
All of these are distinctly increasing the life span, and ability to treat diseases and medical conditions considered difficult earlier.
Please elucidate on the importance of EMR in healthcare? What are the benefits accrued from it?
A very efficient and simple EMR is an extremely integral part of the hospital infrastructure. Given the government regulations on retention period of medical records, increasing medico-legal cases, precious time of doctors, space crunch in hospitals, the need to refer case histories quickly and many more such critical needs – it is absolutely essential to have a good EMR in the hospital. The key benefits hospitals can accrue are:
- Saving of space to preserve records
- Ease in maintaining health information of patients for longer durations
- Faster search of records for quick reference
- Reduced healthcare costs
- Practically paperless medical history
- Ease to distribute specific records to patient
What should hospitals look for while choosing an EMR? The criteria and the parameters
While choosing an EMR, hospital should look at four ‘A’spects carefully v Aggregation, v Archival, v Access and v Analytics
Aggregation refers to collecting and assembling all required patient data. While scanning the paper records is an essential activity, capturing the right information from relevant source points in an easily accessible electronic format is very important. By ‘information’ here I mean, all data pertaining to the patient’s stay in the hospital – registration / visit details, diagnosis, treatment, test reports, etc.
All patient information should be available under one umbrella.
Archival is about how you are going to store this aggregated information. Q’s about the security and disaster management come into picture here.
Medical records and information must be absolutely secure! Access determines the retrieval of all these records and information. MRD personnel, doctors and nurses may need to view the EMR for different purposes. Some hospitals also favour e-sharing of records with patients. The EMR must have the flexibility to quickly deliver selective information to the users, ‘securely’ as per their preferences.
Records must be available quickly when required only to the entitled persons. And, analytics gives EMR a 360 degree closure. After assembling all the medical records and information, you must be able to generate Audit Trails and MIS Reports which give insights in your key functional areas – as in, which department has higher turnover of patients, which records have completed the retention period, etc.
Tell us about your offerings in this sphere and their USPs in comparison to the other similar offerings in the market?
We offer an end-to-end solution to hospitals. Hardware, software, manpower and storage space – all under one roof. Moreover, our solution fits easily in the hospital environment, with setup ready in two to three days.
Our proprietary work-flows allow hospitals to move from paper records to EMR, in an incredibly simple yet fast manner. This has helped our customers save some valuable time and costs.
One of our most important USPs is that our solutions are inspired by the suggestions contributed by our customers, that is — hospitals , doctors and patients. So in essence, it is tailor made. This also helps us to continuously enhance our service offerings.
Any examples elaborating the use of your product/s and the advantages availed? (clients and case studies)
In one of the cases: One senior doctor was on a vacation outside of Mumbai. While on vacation there was an urgent need to provide medical insight in to a medico-legal case that was being discussed in the court. Our online EMR application enabled the doctor on vacation to refer to the patients’ medical records, understand the case and provide an immediate input for the hospital to clarify their line of treatment.
How big is the market for EMR in India? How does it fare vis-a-vis the global markets?
North America is the world’s largest market at about $9 billion and Europe, Latin America and Africa (together) are sized at around $6 billion. The Asia-Pacific market is estimated over $2 billion, and expected to grow at 7-8 per cent annually, with high dependence on China and India markets.
Traditionally healthcare across the world, and especially in India, has been traditionally conservative in including Information Technology (IT) in normal routine. This mindset is going through a change. We can see growing enthusiasm from healthcare administrators and doctors to know how IT can assist them in their work. We can also see them now being able to identify merits of working with a specialist in Health IT to handle their medical records, rather than employing a neighbourhood scanning operator.
What are the challenges in this sphere that need to be overcome to propel growth?
One of the biggest challenge facing the medical world today is – time of treating doctors. This time crunch could be addressed by an effective EMR through use of technology (24×7 availability of records online) and tools (access on mobile devices).
The other key challenge is – acceptance of electronic records for the purpose of insurance, medico-legal cases. Government departments such as income tax and registrar of companies are widely using digital signatures and e-filing. Governmental guidelines around acceptability of EMR for health insurance and litigation will prove as a shot in the arm for EMR.
- Advertisement -
