For years, medical records have been stored in the doctor's office filing cabinet.
This meant that as long as you kept going to the same doctor for your entire life, and never changed, you'd be fine.
However, when you went to a different doctor, you'd have to get a whole new set of medical records, or have your old ones sent over from your previous doctor.
Therefore, the implementation electronic medical records is one of the best ways to keep everyone up to date about someone's particular medical history.
With EMR, your medical records will always be accessible no matter which doctor you go to.
When you have all of your past information in stored electronically, doctors and nurses can search through the database easily for your past conditions, medications that you are on, and even allergies.
Since electronic medical records are easier to access and keep organized there is less chance that little things such as an illness that you had a long time ago or a more recent complaint will be overlooked.
Electronic medical records allow the doctor to see what medicines you are taking and keeps you from over-medicating on your prescriptions.
Some of the EMR software has inputs so that your doctors and nurses can make sure your medications don't react poorly with each other as well.
It's very easy and convenient to take your electronic health records with you from one doctor to another.
However, there are some legitimate concern about the use of EMR.
One error in record keeping could lead to huge problems because the data gets spread with great speed.
So proper training for all who work with EMR is of the utmost importance.
This includes the personalization of the electronic records, diligence about the software's default settings, and choosing the medical encoding by human means instead of a computer whenever possible.
If these methods are followed then there should be no major problems.
EMR is relatively inexpensive to implement and will allow physicians to actually save a lot of money over the use of paper records.
The use of electronic health records makes the practice of medicine move along faster and easier for all concerned.
The solution seems obvious for those who haven't yet implemented EMR.
That solution would be to learn more about providers and get it set up in your practice as soon as possible.