Feb 24
2019
How Electronic Health Records Are Impacting the Healthcare Industry
By Lauren Adley, writer and editor, UK Best Essays.
The healthcare industry has traditionally relied on the pen-and-paper archiving system, creating huge but impractical data libraries. However, the situation is changing in the last couple of decades with the introduction of electronic health records (EHR).
According to the report, more than 80 percent of the US hospitals adopted at least a basic EHR system. It’s a major improvement that drastically changes the way medical practitioners complete their everyday tasks. But what makes EHR systems so powerful? How can they contribute to the overall productivity in the field of medicine?
We will give you the answers to these questions in this article. Keep reading to see how EHR are impacting the healthcare industry.
5 ways EHR changes healthcare
There are many ways EHR is helping healthcare to advance, but some solutions already proved to be very important for the functioning of the medical staff. We made a list of the five most important improvements here:
- Speed and productivity
The first way digital health records are influencing the healthcare industry is obvious: they help the system become better and more productive. Medical staff no longer has to write things down. Instead, all entries are just a few clicks away, so the whole process becomes faster than ever before. This gives doctors and nurses more time to do what they are trained to do – help patients to get better.
- Improved treatment
The second way EHR is changing medicine is probably the most important. Namely, patients get an enhanced treatment due to the precision and transparency of medical records. For instance, a doctor can instantly see previous health problems of a patient and determine whether this person is allergic to certain drugs or substances.