Electronic Medical Records

Abstract

An Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system is a new technology of shifting patients’ paper-based records into a digital format.   EMR systems have shown success in Dutch hospitals. This new technology is still under development at U.S. hospitals. The scope of this paper is to illustrate the different perspectives of how people look at this new technology whether they are healthcare practitioners, or even patients. The advantages and disadvantages of EMR systems are analyzed in terms of cost, time, and the quality of care. Through assessing these attributes and comparing them with established EMR systems at some U.S. hospitals, results show that EMR systems can have potential benefits that can overcome their drawbacks.

Electronic Medical Records
An Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system is a way of transforming patients’ health information from paper format to digital. Despite its huge benefits, especially in making many clinical decisions through the combination of clinical, financial, and demographic information related to the treatment of patients, people criticize the system because of the dilemma of privacy (Richards et al., 2012). An EMR system is also critiqued for the time spent by physicians and other related parties to learn about the EMR system functions (Miller et al., 2004). An EMR system may reveal other disadvantages such as the data entry burden while creating the medical records (George et al., 2000). In the implementation process of any EMR system, the coordination between physicians, nurses, and patients, is required to provide potential competitiveness in the healthcare industry (Richards et al., 2012). EMR systems in the U.S. are still in the development process, and they may still have drawbacks.
EMR systems have already been executed in most Dutch hospitals. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was performed amongst 150 doctors and 148 nurses in Dutch hospitals to test their acceptance to the EMR systems and it showed that the...