ScanCARE Blog

Electronic Medical Record systems have now been widely adopted in Australia and around the world. Possibly the most publicised roll out has been in the United States with the government providing significant fiscal incentives under the Meaningful Use program.

In this blog I use the terms EHR and EMR interchangeably.

In the US for example it's common to use EHR (Electronic Health Record) as the term for a patient’s medical record, whereas in Australia, the personal health record system, MyHealth Record is commonly referred to as an EHR. In Australia, the patient record is generally referred to as an EMR (Electronic Medical Record)

Traditional EHR systems do not meet ophthalmologists' functional requirements. This is what an August 2011 report published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) says.

The paper which is titled ‘Special Requirements for Electronic Health Record Systems in Ophthalmology’ argues that the field of ophthalmology has a number of ‘specialty specific’ requirements that are not taken into consideration by traditional EHR systems. Its abstract reads:

Medical Forms and AS28281.1

A whole new world of benefits will open up to you when you move from a paper based medical records system to digital.

For example you can create custom lists of things like medications or health funds and link them to text pickers and select lists. This way, instead of having to use the keyboard, users users can select an item from a (dropdown) list. So accuracy is greatly improved because the risk of typing errors is minimised.

You also have the option of adding check boxes to select “yes/no” type checks and transfer data automatically from one text field to another, so you only have to type it once!

These are just a few example but digital medical records offer you so many options.  So let’s take a look at an example medical record and apply some digital magic to it.

I don’t know how many tender documents I have filled out that contain questions about integration. Can it integrate with this, can it integrate with that?

It may seem a good idea to cover all bases and request technology vendors to integrate with your existing solutions. However in my experience integration can be complex to setup and maintain and it doesn’t always give you a lot of benefit. The risk in integrating systems from individual technology vendors is that your business continuity is now in the hands of two vendors who frequently have no partnership or existing or previous collaboration.