Streamline Your Medical Record Keeping Process

The advancement of technology has benefitted almost every type of business and situation in the world.  Included is the health care industry, which has greatly benefitted from new and developing technology.  One method that has greatly helped the healthcare industry is the electronic medical records system. An electronic method of keeping patient charts and records has many positives and only a few negatives.

 Fewer mistakes and incorrect transcriptions are a definite benefit of electronic record keeping.  Misreading handwriting has always been a concern in the medical industry, but now that records can be typed directly onto a computer and kept in an online system, handwriting is no longer an issue, and records can be cross checked against patient history to make sure treatments and medications are correct.

 Network sharing is another bonus of electronic record keeping.  Many doctors work hand in hand with hospital systems, making it easy for other doctors in the system to access a patient’s medical histories and test results.  For example, a patient can be directed to a hospital for specific testing like an x-ray or MRI.  The results are then inputted into the electronic system. Then, the patient’s doctor can access the test results and determine a method of treatment for the patient.  This helps the process move along much more quickly than waiting in results to be hand delivered to the doctor.

 Instant access to medical records is much better than waiting for someone to locate a file.  Doctors have hundreds of patients with thousands of pages of records.  If they have to wait for individual files to be pulled, this puts extra time into a doctor’s already busy schedule.  But, with electronic medical recording, a doctor can step into the room with a patient and locate their files on the computer at that moment.  This saves a lot of time for the doctor and cuts the patient’s wait time drastically.

  Along with positives are the negatives of the system.  Probably the largest concern of electronic record keeping is privacy.  With so many malicious viruses and hackers looking to gain information, patient privacy is always a concern that medical record keepers work to protect. Also, electronic systems have not been implemented by every physician, meaning that sometimes, patients will still have to wait on records to be sent even if their primary information is kept electronically. But these negatives seem minute when compared to all of the advantages that electronic medical record keeping offers.