Summary:
The EHR brings new information technology to the practice of medicine that benefits you and your physician and will become indispensable to healthcare.

Details or Sample:
Electronic Health Records: Seeing your Physician in a New Way

There is a new fix proposed for the ailing health industry that has healthcare optimistically excited…the Electronic Health Record (EHR). At your next office visit, you could be seen by a physician who uses the hand-held, computerized EHR to help evaluate, assess, and plan your course of treatment.

Driven by the trend away from using traditional paper charts (known as going paperless), the use of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) secure, medical technology to access comprehensive, patient information has mass appeal to both government and healthcare sectors. What the medical world wants to avoid are catastrophes such as the Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans, Louisiana. These survivors required immediate medical care but their charts with past histories of illness, records of medication, and known, life-threatening allergies were destroyed and unavailable for emergency treatment. Electronic health data is archived on back-up media and stored offsite in secure, weather-proof, locations. Many practices now store their data electronically through backup service providers that may be hundreds of miles away. Following a disaster, life-saving electronic medical health care records can easily be accessed and restored to full use for caregivers.

Today, when you see your healthcare provider, he may use a hand-held, wireless EHR device during your visit. Other caregivers such as nurses, physician assistants, and therapists, may have taken vital sign measurements including temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure, and weight and entered these measurements into your electronic file. They may also note the reason for your visit that day with a description of symptoms. Your physician continues the review of systems affecting your visit, takes your history of present illness, performs a physical exam, makes a diagnosis, and an accessment and plan for treatment including orders for lab tests, procedures, medications, and referrals.

How do you benefit? All your health information from your current visit can be analyzed against various health measurement indices as well as past visits. Various other components integrated into the EHR can immediately check medications for drug interactions for any ordered prescriptions you ever filled at a pharmacy anywhere in the nation. Your caregiver can electronically send a prescription to your pharmacy so that it will be there when you leave the office, and in some offices, thanks to electronic medication inventories made available to physicians, your first fill of an ordered medication (an antibiotic or perhaps medication for a seriously-ill child) is available right there to take with you. No stopping at the pharmacy on your way home.

The Electronic Health Record utilized by your healthcare provider leads to other 24/7services such as electronic access to the practice website. Using a website, you can send/receive caregiver messages, request an office appointment or medication refill, review lab results, enter daily personal measurement feedback data helpful for monitoring weight, heart or diabetes-related managed care, or request copies of your health or immunization records…all from the comfort and convenience of your home or office.

The EHR brings new information technology to the practice of medicine that benefits you and your physician and will become indispensable to how medicine is practiced today.

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