EMR Magazine

How EMR can provide clinics with just the solution they need

Here, in this article, you will get to know a Doctor’s take on how an EMR can help clinics bolster their productivity. Dr. Ogo, a respected practitioner and CEO of Kidney Solutions Limited in Nigeria, has shared his views on EMR and its impact on clinics as follows:

The electronic medical record (EMR) is a tool of modern-day medicine that may be perceived as an instrument only for documentation of medical care.
However, a properly designed and used EMR should be seen more as a tool for
• documentation of the patient medical encounter for both medical and legal purposes,
• documentation of the process of care
• documentation of the structure or environment of care.
• documentation of the outcome of care.

For those familiar with the principles of quality of care, they would have already identified the basis of quality assessment of care in the preceding statements that involve measures of structure, process, and outcomes of healthcare delivery.

Therefore, the EMR if properly designed captures these key elements of the healthcare encounter and lends itself not only as an instrument for recording a medical encounter for later reference but enables measurement of different aspects of quality of care which eventually could be made to bring value beyond the improvement in the health of patients.

A properly designed EMR is an important distinction from any kind of EMR because if the EMR cannot be broken down and analyzed into its component parts, it is essentially far less useful and probably not even as useful OR NEAR USELESS for its initially perceived value of being an archive for medical encounters.
To explain the value of a properly designed EMR let’s first start with what makes up the structure, process, and outcomes of care. It hopefully will then become obvious how an EMR if properly designed will be able to help in the delivery of goals that go beyond being a simple archive of medical encounters.

 

Rachana Suraiya