Electronic health record

A medical record or health record is a consolidated view of distributed health records in digital format and provides real-time, secure, patient-centric information for clinical management of patients.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) maintains health records and supports systematic patient data compilation, namely demographics, medical complaints and history, findings of physical examinations, laboratory tests and results, other diagnostic reports, medications, management plans, monitoring tools, self care, etc.
Ideally, EMR augments clinical care for each patient across care providers, facilities and even international care services.
A paper-based medical record is fragmented, not easily portable, unorganised and frustrating for both clinicians and patients. An EMR is not a mere translation of paper-based medical record, but is crucial in putting patient information at the center of citizen-centric healthcare management in an intelligent and user-friendly manner.
When we consider the benefits for patients, care providers, organisations and at national levels, we can rationalise that a well developed EMR is the single most important innovation in healthcare that enables efficient, effective and affordable healthcare.
In Bangladesh, there are a handful of healthcare facilities that are using EMR in multitude of ways. EMR is indispensable to any clinical scenario and is the keystone of eHealth. It can also be the source of many primary data that can be used for secondary purposes, such as in national epidemiological disease systems, surveillance for communicable diseases demanding urgent intervention, etc.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has taken an initiative to pilot 'Hospital Automation' system using an open source EMR called Opener. As commercial EMRs become more available, use of those, especially in the academic institutions, acute care and outpatient centers for faster adoption and dissemination, will create the groundwork from both public and private sectors in realising the national eHealth vision.

The writer is the President & CEO of InformaticaHealth, USA & eHEALTH SOLUTIONS, Bangladesh.
E-mail: [email protected]
For more publications on related topics, please visit http://www.ehealth-bd.com /publications.html