The advantages of using an electronic medical record

01/03

Using an electronic medical record (EMR) significantly improves efficiency in the health-care setting from an administrative standpoint, ultimately improving patient care.

EMRs make comprehensive patient information readily accessible. Not only can a physician quickly locate a detailed and thorough patient record — one can also search all patients who meet a given criteria. These searches are very efficient using an EMR. In addition to patient information, care guidelines can be accessed from the same system.

EMRs simplify and quicken the process of ordering investigations. They fill out the patient information and allow the completed requisition to be printed. Furthermore, EMRs provide timely access to lab and imaging results. Information from the lab can be entered into a patient’s record from one location to be accessed instantly by the physician at a different computer. This ultimately prevents delays and allows for patient management decisions to be made sooner.

By storing and organizing a patient’s lab results, EMRs also provide an avenue for trending. As well, remote access to test results from home, or while travelling, ensures that urgent test results won’t get missed.

The process of prescribing medications is greatly simplified using an EMR. A physician can access lists of commonly prescribed drugs, or view and track medications prescribed for a certain patient. This eliminates the need to manually track prescriptions. EMRs can also provide safety alerts in cases involving possible interactions or drug allergies. And, when using EMRs, there is no longer a concern regarding legibility, or patient alterations of the prescription.

Also, billing is made very simple electronically, reducing the administrative workload.

• An EMR provides tools that enhance the clinician’s practice in areas such as preventive medicine and chronic disease management, improving patient care.

EMRs are invaluable in the area of preventive care. They are capable of issuing reminders for immunizations and screens, tracking and trending a patient’s data to facilitate early detection of disease, and setting automatic alerts when test results fall outside of healthy ranges. Furthermore, these features may be customized according to practice guidelines or one’s own preferences.

These features also enable better management of chronic disease. For example, a patient with hypertension could have his or her blood pressure recorded and tracked over time. This encourages assessment of current management and more informed decision-making.

EMRs are useful in providing order sheets for various conditions. These are essentially templates that list questions to ask, levels to check, or imaging to be done for a given disease. For example, an order sheet for diabetes may include ophthalmology referrals, ulceration exams, microalbuminuria checks, and many other items. It is clear that this encourages comprehensive patient assessment and reduces the risk that things may be missed. This may also serve as an effective learning tool for clinical clerks and residents.

EMRs can facilitate the policing of drug-seeking behaviours. By maintaining an accessible record of medications prescribed and the reasons behind them, as well as indications of drug-seeking behaviours, the health-care provider is more likely to be aware of this issue.

• An EMR offers a simple venue for the evaluation of many areas of the clinician’s practice, in turn improving patient care.

The comprehensive and readily accessible data stored in an EMR enables improved quality assurance. Physicians can evaluate whether they are meeting practice guidelines and how they are doing as a physician quickly and efficiently. For instance, a family physician can check whether he or she is referring every diabetic patient to an ophthalmologist annually. Or a rheumatologist can assess whether he or she is checking lipid levels regularly in each lupus patient. These searches can be done without the time-consuming and administratively challenging process of going through written charts.

Many EMRs provide tools that allow the physician to calculate outcome measures in order to assess a patient’s overall disease control. Many items may be factored in to provide a score as an indicator of whether one is effectively treating a given patient. If such outcome measures are incorporated into one’s practice, they can influence changes in disease management.

• The EMR system is invaluable in its impact on communication between various medical institutions, health-care providers, and patients, greatly improving patient care. In a multidisciplinary care setting, one of the greatest challenges is communication. All members of the care team need access to patient information, and an EMR not only provides a venue for information access, but also for summarizing cases and sharing recommendations in dictated consultation notes. In this way, an EMR aids communication among members of the care team,1 without legibility being a barrier.

• Active and continuous use of EMRs has the potential to facilitate advances in medicine through research, ultimately improving patient care.

EMR data can be a tremendous resource for researchers. In addition to being readily available, the type of clinical data that can be obtained from an EMR is, in many ways, superior to that which researchers often collect from surveys and patient reports. For instance, EMR data could provide specific values for age, ethnicity, sex, weight, height, and visit date, which could be used to calculate body mass index, and thus study the typical age of onset of obesity in a given ethnic population. Furthermore, EMR data could allow researchers to precisely identify potential subjects for clinical trials, or patient samples for cohort studies.

Not only would the use of EMRs save time and money that can be directed toward research, on a greater level, EMRs can facilitate major advances in medical knowledge.2

Using an electronic medical record (EMR) significantly improves efficiency in the health-care setting from an administrative standpoint, ultimately improving patient care.

EMRs make comprehensive patient information readily accessible. Not only can a physician quickly locate a detailed and thorough patient record — one can also search all patients who meet a given criteria. These searches are very efficient using an EMR. In addition to patient information, care guidelines can be accessed from the same system.

EMRs simplify and quicken the process of ordering investigations. They fill out the patient information and allow the completed requisition to be printed. Furthermore, EMRs provide timely access to lab and imaging results. Information from the lab can be entered into a patient’s record from one location to be accessed instantly by the physician at a different computer. This ultimately prevents delays and allows for patient management decisions to be made sooner.

By storing and organizing a patient’s lab results, EMRs also provide an avenue for trending. As well, remote access to test results from home, or while travelling, ensures that urgent test results won’t get missed.

The process of prescribing medications is greatly simplified using an EMR. A physician can access lists of commonly prescribed drugs, or view and track medications prescribed for a certain patient. This eliminates the need to manually track prescriptions. EMRs can also provide safety alerts in cases involving possible interactions or drug allergies. And, when using EMRs, there is no longer a concern regarding legibility, or patient alterations of the prescription.

Also, billing is made very simple electronically, reducing the administrative workload.

• An EMR provides tools that enhance the clinician’s practice in areas such as preventive medicine and chronic disease management, improving patient care.

EMRs are invaluable in the area of preventive care. They are capable of issuing reminders for immunizations and screens, tracking and trending a patient’s data to facilitate early detection of disease, and setting automatic alerts when test results fall outside of healthy ranges. Furthermore, these features may be customized according to practice guidelines or one’s own preferences.

These features also enable better management of chronic disease. For example, a patient with hypertension could have his or her blood pressure recorded and tracked over time. This encourages assessment of current management and more informed decision-making.

EMRs are useful in providing order sheets for various conditions. These are essentially templates that list questions to ask, levels to check, or imaging to be done for a given disease. For example, an order sheet for diabetes may include ophthalmology referrals, ulceration exams, microalbuminuria checks, and many other items. It is clear that this encourages comprehensive patient assessment and reduces the risk that things may be missed. This may also serve as an effective learning tool for clinical clerks and residents.

EMRs can facilitate the policing of drug-seeking behaviours. By maintaining an accessible record of medications prescribed and the reasons behind them, as well as indications of drug-seeking behaviours, the health-care provider is more likely to be aware of this issue.

• An EMR offers a simple venue for the evaluation of many areas of the clinician’s practice, in turn improving patient care.

The comprehensive and readily accessible data stored in an EMR enables improved quality assurance. Physicians can evaluate whether they are meeting practice guidelines and how they are doing as a physician quickly and efficiently. For instance, a family physician can check whether he or she is referring every diabetic patient to an ophthalmologist annually. Or a rheumatologist can assess whether he or she is checking lipid levels regularly in each lupus patient. These searches can be done without the time-consuming and administratively challenging process of going through written charts.

Many EMRs provide tools that allow the physician to calculate outcome measures in order to assess a patient’s overall disease control. Many items may be factored in to provide a score as an indicator of whether one is effectively treating a given patient. If such outcome measures are incorporated into one’s practice, they can influence changes in disease management.

02/03

• The EMR system is invaluable in its impact on communication between various medical institutions, health-care providers, and patients, greatly improving patient care. In a multidisciplinary care setting, one of the greatest challenges is communication. All members of the care team need access to patient information, and an EMR not only provides a venue for information access, but also for summarizing cases and sharing recommendations in dictated consultation notes. In this way, an EMR aids communication among members of the care team,1 without legibility being a barrier.

• Active and continuous use of EMRs has the potential to facilitate advances in medicine through research, ultimately improving patient care.

EMR data can be a tremendous resource for researchers. In addition to being readily available, the type of clinical data that can be obtained from an EMR is, in many ways, superior to that which researchers often collect from surveys and patient reports. For instance, EMR data could provide specific values for age, ethnicity, sex, weight, height, and visit date, which could be used to calculate body mass index, and thus study the typical age of onset of obesity in a given ethnic population. Furthermore, EMR data could allow researchers to precisely identify potential subjects for clinical trials, or patient samples for cohort studies.

Not only would the use of EMRs save time and money that can be directed toward research, on a greater level, EMRs can facilitate major advances in medical knowledge.2

1. Only members of a patient’s “Circle of Care,” as understood under the Personal Health Information Protection Act, are permitted to access a patient’s files.

2. There are various privacy and consent requirements associated with research. Physicians should ensure they are familiar and compliant with these prior to using the EMR as a research tool.

03/03

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This article was written by Dr. Hanif Jamal and Dr. Koyelle Papneja, and originally published in the February 2012 issue of the Ontario Medical Review.