The Benefits of Electronic Patient Charts

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When walking into a hospital, nursing home, or physician’s office, electronic devices are used everywhere. The doctors have pagers, drugs are released from an apparatus similar to vending machines, and the patients are connected to intravenous pumps and monitors, while they lay on beds that move with the touch of a button. Everything seems to be electronic, except for patient charts. A new system, called eHealth, was devised that would make these patient charts electronic. The goal for electronic health is to unite all healthcare by making patient records available to all providers in order to improve the quality of care patients receive. eHealth can be adopted into hospitals, physicians’ offices, and even ambulatory services. A 2006 study found, “Ambulatory EHRs improve the structure of care delivery, improve clinical processes, and enhance outcomes” (Shekelle 61). With professionals working together, procedures, scans, tests, and even visits to the hospital can be eliminated and in turn reduce the hospital’s expenses. However, this reduction may not add up to the investment the facilities will have to make. Adopting this system will cost more the some facilities are able to spend. However, investing in eHealth is a risk hospitals should take to improve patient care. eHealth has to become affordable to all providers for healthcare to reach its full potential.

With eHealth, a doctor can go up to a computer, pull up patient’s files and see everything the patient takes for medications, any tests given and their results. This would be very beneficial to doctors especially working in trauma, where patients may be unable to tell doctors which prescriptions they are on or any medical history they might have. This could eli...

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....” Review of Ophthalmology. March. 2009: 21. Web. 7 October 2011.

Hernandez, Lyla M. “Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary.” Washington, D.C. : National Academies Press, 2009. ebrary. Web. 27 October 2011.

Lohr, Steve. “Most Doctors Aren’t Using Electronic Health Records.” New York Times. New York Times, 19 June 2008. Web. 13 Nov. 2011.

Senate Bill No.945. Passed 2 June 201.

Shekelle, Paul, and Sally Morton. “Costs and Benefits of Health Information Technology.” Evidence Report/Technology Assessment, Number 132. Southern California Evidence-based Practice Center, CA. April 2006. Web. 13 Nov. 2011.

Sldorov, Jaan. “Market Watch: It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Electronic Health Record and the Unlikely Prospect of Reducing Health Care Costs.” Health Affairs. Volume 25 Number 4 (2006): 1079.

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