Free Essay: Electronic Health Record Systems in Medicine and Healthcare

The medical show episode presents a doctor known to be a great surgeon preparing for a public speech to interns and new doctors learning to better their expertise. However, she is not sure of her confidence since she hates giving public speeches. She references her presentation from her computer that displays pictures of badly disfigured legs to the audience. She shows the audience pictures before and after her patients’ scans. This helps her to narrate her happenings in the surgery room as well as her feelings after a successful operation. Medical computers in this show are used to educate inexperienced doctors and interns, and to keep records of the patients before and after treatments.

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Medical computers have led to the provision of higher quality health care information and guidelines, and improved service delivery (Ferlie, et al. 2001). Electronic health record systems consume less time and space compared to paper-based records thus more efficient to both health providers and patients. EHRs give accurate information such as a patient's laboratory results that minimize errors during health delivery. EHRs have increased the capability to carry out health research, have enhanced methods to improve health centers’ revenues, have minimized billing mistakes and have better legal and regulatory agreement. EHRs are beneficial in covering the cost of other health care resources such as medical charts.

However, the cost of implementing and maintaining EHRs is greater than that of paper-based health records. Training of health providers to is costly, and other financial losses experienced during the transition from paperwork to EHRs. The introduction of EHRs results to minimized productivity until the change of the health working systems stabilizes. In addition, leakage of a patient's privacy may occur due to information exchanges within the system thus disadvantaging the concerned patient. Other unintended errors too can occur for instance due to a power alteration.

Work cited

Ferlie, Ewan B., and Stephen M. Shortell. "Improving the quality of health care in the United Kingdom and the United States: a framework for change." The Milbank Quarterly 79.2 (2001): 281-315.