The security issues of paper and electronic health record systems and the issues to be considered when converting to an EHR system. |
Barriers to Implementing an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system
Barriers to implementing an EHR system
Below is a list of ten things that are true barriers for most health care organizations today. Please review the list and decide which barrier your organization is facing. The first step is to acknowledge the issue(s) and then you can tackle them head on. Good luck.
#1 Difficulty in adding older records to an EHR system
Today there are organizations that pick a start date and then implement their new EHR system but older paper medical records ought to be incorporated into a patient’s electronic health record. One method of doing this is to merely scan the documents and retain them as images. However, surveys suggest that 22-25% of physicians are less satisfied with records systems that use scanned documents alone rather than fully electronic data-based systems. The reason is that they are hard to read. EHR systems with image archival capability are able to integrate these scanned records into fully electronic health records systems. This method makes the record more complete. Another method is to convert written records (such as notes) into electronic format is to scan the documents then perform optical character recognition. For typed documents, accurate recognition may only achieve 90-95%, though, requiring extensive corrections. Furthermore, illegible handwriting is poorly recognized by optical character readers. This means that there might be some records that are hard to read. Some states have proposed making existing statewide database data (such as immunization records) available for download into individual electronic medical records. This
References: http://healthcaretracker.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/barriers-to-implementing-an-electronic-health-record-ehr-system/