Impact of Electronic Health Record

The Impact of Electronic Health Records in

Efforts have been consistent whilst implementing the electronic health record in the Canadian healthcare system to assist various healthcare providers in delivering the most efficient and effective patient care. Electronic Health Records are “electronically maintained information about an individual’s lifetime health condition and healthcare…The use of this technology would practically eliminate paper medical records and the cost of supplies and space to store them” (Gupta & Murtaza, 2009, p. 22). Although the effective and efficient use of this technology has resulted in a positive change for many Canadian providers, it has also created a few setbacks and limitations during the process of implementation. The most prominent issue when discussing electronic health records is that of patient safety. The significant relationship between electronic health records and patient safety is relevant for many healthcare providers in order to understand the various positive and negative consequences before fully adopting the EHR system. Issues addressed above, as well as many other significant details will be discussed further, along with suggestions and solutions in implementing the electronic health record systems successfully, efficiently, and effectively, regardless of the kind of impact it has been having on the Canadian health care system.

There are many on-going limitations that come to surface when implementing efficient systems like EHR, such as privacy, legal, storage, conversion and other costs which are key issues in order to determine whether the implementation of a particular electronic health record system is suitable and appropriate for an organization. Privacy issues usually involve the privacy of the patient, and the breach of privacy has turned out to be a serious issue in terms of a patient’s medical record, because “many patients view their medical records very private as they contain intimate details of...