Electronic Health Records Essay

EMR essay

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Electronic Health Records

The electronic health records fits seamlessly with a central cost-saving of health care reform: to shift U.S. health care from an expensive, pay-per-service system based on quantity to one that emphasizes quality. The goal now is to have medical payments reward good care -- in a way that's difficult to do with paper records. "You really can't have accountable care without electronic records," says Judy Hanover, a research director for IDC Health Insights, a health care research and marketing firm based in Framingham, Mass. "It provides the data and information foundation you need to implement accountable care." Why should you care about how your doctor keeps records? Because, thanks to the technological push, you'll soon have online access to your complete medical records for the first time. The government says not only can electronic health records reduce unnecessary tests and procedures, help your doctor coordinate your care with other providers and avert medical mistakes due to incomplete or incorrect information, but they also may save your life by enabling you to carry all of your own health records on your cell phone or mobile device. Medicare and Veterans Affairs beneficiaries already can access their claims records through the federal "Blue Button" online service. "This is going to rock!" says Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the national coordinator for health information technology and the captain of the federal electronic records initiative. "This is going to change things in a pretty fundamental way." Getting America's health care providers to go digital has been no easy task. Mostashari notes that there are hundreds of medical software vendors of all sizes and more than 1,000 software systems in use, and few of them communicate with one another. Some physicians continue to view electronic note-taking as time-wasting rather than time-saving. To ease the pain of transition, Congress allocated $27 billion for financial incentives,...