Healthcare professionals spend a lifetime upholding the oath they took early in their careers. The oath requires them to care for the sick to the best of their abilities and judgment. Technology, no doubt, has assisted them throughout the centuries in keeping this oath.
The latest generation of doctors has electronic health records (EHR) to assist them in improving the quality of their care. Take the EHR and their ability to improve the quality of information availability – all the information about patients, including radiological imaging, is available in one convenient location at any hour of the day. Physicians count on this kind of availability to better care for their patients.
EHR are being used in many healthcare facilities, including rural care facilities, as the foundation of quality improvement. For instance, EHR allows healthcare professionals the ability to take extracted reports on their patients and on disease registries to keep tabs on the care the patients are receiving and provide fodder for discussions regarding the changes that need to be made to improve the quality of the care they’re receiving.
In order for these healthcare facilities to stay in operations, they must watch their budgets and plan very carefully. EHR assist in improving efficiencies and offer cost savings where they weren’t available before. A recent survey of doctors across the nation shows that nearly 80 percent of them are finding these efficiencies with their EHR. More than 80 percent of doctors said that using the e-prescription tools in EHR saves them time, and about three-quarters of the doctors surveyed said they are getting their lab results faster. Furthermore, the confidentiality of health records has also improved, said about 70 percent of the doctors surveyed.
For patient care to truly improve, the patient must be involved. EHR give patients this added access. For instance, patients with chronic conditions like diabetes and obesity can use EHR to have 24/7 access to the information they need to make better decisions regarding their health. Unless the patient is taking notes during the consultation with their doctors, much of what is said can be forgotten, as some of it is fairly technical. But by reading doctor’s notes in the EHR following a visit, patients can review the doctor’s orders and follow accordingly.
Errors in the healthcare facility are taken very seriously as they can lead to disastrous results. But errors in the era of EHR have been reduced, which improves patient safety. This occurs through the fact that EHR aren’t simply solutions that store and send data – they actually compute it. Automation tools will alert doctors when a prescribed medication could potentially harm the patient due to an allergy or interaction with another drug.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., embraces the EHR and has even created a system of its own to further improve the patient care at rural healthcare facilities and radiological facilities. Honeycomb, a platform designed by OffSite to help disparate digital silos share data across multiple systems and organizations and helps medical staff deliver the highest quality medical care.