(Week 1) [T2] Electronic Health Record Systems

Question 1

What is an EHR?

Answer 1

Repository of electronically maintained information about an individual’s lifetime health status and health care, stored such that it can serve the multiple uses and users.

Question 2

Advantages of an EHR?

Answer 2

• Flexible and adaptable (one way in, many formats out).
• Easy to enter data (could be imported from instruments or other EHR).
• Incorporation of multimedia information.
• Data more accessible, legible (compared with handwritten) and reusable.

Question 3

Success factors of EHR?

Answer 3

1. Comprehensiveness of information (info on health and illness, full-spectrum of clinical data).
2. Duration of use and retention of data (more data, more value).
3. Ubiquity of acess (only accessible by an authorized user).

Question 4

Disadvantages of EHR?

Answer 4

• Requires a large initial investment (hardware, software, training and support costs).
• Potential for catastrophic failures.
• Capturing doctor’s input data, which is the most valuable, is expensive.

Question 5

5 functional components of EHR?

Answer 5

1. Integrated view of patient data (text, numbers, images, videos).
2. Clinical decision support.
3. Clinician order entry (the point at which clinicians make decisions and take actions).
4. Access to knowledge resources (present information relevant to a particular clinical situation and present it to the clinician on the fly).
5. Integrated communication and reporting support.

Question 6

Issues for automated patient record systems?

Answer 6

1. Data capture.
2. Data display.
3. Query and surveillance systems.