Health Care Innovation

An innovation is described as something new or different being introduced into a situation. In healthcare an innovation could be useful or wasteful. There are many ideas that have come into play but only a few ideas really made a difference in the healthcare field. The innovation that I believe made a real difference in the healthcare field is the electronic medical records (EMR). Electronic medical records have recently been introduced in the health care field and so far have been getting a positive feedback. Electronic medical records can benefit patients in many ways. One major way it can benefit a patient is the efficiency of the records being organized and easy for any practitioner or staff member to read. EMR can lower the risks of someone making a mistake from not being able to read the doctors handwriting. The software can bring to the attention of the staff if the patient has medical alerts that they should be aware of such as high blood pressure, diabetes or any major life threatening allergies like penicillin. Patient’s information can easily be looked up instead of going through a chart, going through pages to see a certain passage on a certain day. EMR benefits the health care field. It is efficient, easy to manage patient’s records. Practitioners can easily see what medicines the patients have been taking without having to ask the patient. A patient’s health history is also saved on to the software for all practitioners to see. Medications can also be submitted to the pharmacy without having to write a prescription. It saves the practitioner time and also it eliminates the risk of having the prescription lost while in transit to the pharmacy. Not only the patient’s information is kept safe, the practitioner’s personal information like license number and NPI is kept safe from prescription fraud if the patient lost the prescription. EMR will increase the health care spending but will be extremely beneficial in the future. In order for every