Why Care About Electronic Health Records?

As chiropractic physicians, we encourage our patients (and everyone else, for that matter) to be active in their own health. On one level, this means developing good lifestyle habits around nutrition, exercise, sleep and stress management that serve to delay or prevent illness and injury-especially the kinds of chronic health conditions that lead to destroy quality of life and lead to long-term medical expenses. On another level, it also means seeking out the right healthcare and working closely with your healthcare providers to diagnose and treat problems effectively when they do occur. Electronic health records (EHR) are a very important part of this equation.

They say that information is power. And it’s true. Having access to your own complete medical history is absolutely essential for people to take ownership of their health and well-being. Fortunately, online access makes this easier than ever. The table below contains just a few ways people are already using this new access*:

The move to EHR has been in the works for a long time. The US government has advocated the change for some very good economic and practical reasons. Here are some of them:

All your health information is kept in one place and is easily accessible. If you switch doctors or are traveling and need to see a physician in a different part of the country, your medical records “follow you.” They don’t have to be sent from one place to another, and you shouldn’t have to repeatedly fill out the same forms. How many times have you had to provide the same basic health history to different medical professionals? How much time did that take? How much time do you think it takes behind the scenes for one healthcare practice to receive patient information from another? EHR is meant to streamline these processes.

Fewer errors and omissions in health records mean fewer medical mistakes. How many times do you think you forgot about a prior procedure or medication when filling out forms in a doctor’s office? What about a family predisposition or allergy? A recent study found that hospitals that had an efficient electronic records system had far healthier patients with fewer medical complications and deaths. So EHR not only saves time and money-it saves lives too.

Prescriptions can be submitted electronically. In the old world, your doctor provided a handwritten prescription to your pharmacist, who was then responsible for deciphering the scribble on the small piece of paper, making sure that it was appropriate for you and then filling it. If you’ve ever looked at the handwriting on a typical prescription pad, you’ll probably agree it’s a miracle anyone ever received the right medication. Electronic prescriptions cannot be lost or misread. An electronic system can also check for drug interactions, so you will be less likely to suffer a bad reaction from two incompatible drugs.

EHR can help your extended healthcare team communicate proactively with you. A Harvard Medical School study found that patients who were automatically sent reminders for colorectal cancer screenings based on their electronic records were more likely to have a screening done than those whose doctors kept conventional records.

Your medical information can be accessed more quickly in an emergency. If an accident or catastrophic event occurs (hurricane Katrina, for example), your important health information can still be located. This is especially important if you’re incapacitated and can’t tell healthcare providers about such things as your blood type, current health problems, allergies and medications you might be taking.

You have access to your own records online at any time. As the survey results we shared earlier suggest, being able to see your health history can be very useful in several different ways. With EHR, you can keep track of things over time. This might include such useful information as your blood pressure measurements, cholesterol levels, weight and other important factors related to your health. You can also keep an eye out for mistakes and do a better job coordinating your own care.

These are just a few of the benefits that electronic health records can provide to the average person, but they also benefit medical science at large. Researchers can use huge medical databases made possible by EHR to perform large-scale statistical analyses of drugs and their effects, much in the same way that they use large-scale clinical trials now.

All in all, EHR offers significant benefits to the individual and to society more broadly. As you can see, there are lots of good reasons to care!

*Source: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s Consumer Survey of Attitudes Toward the Privacy and Security Aspects of Electronic Health Records and Health Information Exchange. 2013 survey of 2,107 adults.