What is an Electronic Health Record (EHR)? Information for Patients
Have you ever been sick, and visited a doctor or specialist that you had never been seen by before? It is likely that this health care professional asked you many questions about yourself and your health history that you’ve had to answer before, in other doctor-patient situations. These questions probably included information about your age, race, exercise habits, diet, and symptoms that you were currently experiencing. Although these questions are intended to give the physician insight into possibly diagnoses, they are often incomplete, and can be complicated if the patient doesn’t really understand how to answer. If you’ve been wondering “What is an Electronic Health Record (EHR)?” you should know that it is a possible solution to this problem.
With all the technological advances that are taking place in the world today, people and professionals now have unprecedented access to information on a wide range of topics, and usually this information can be accessed at one of many mobile viewing points, such as wireless internet on a computer, or a hand held device like a smart phone. If you’ve been listening to the news about ways that this technology can be applied to the health care field, you might be asking yourself, "What is an Electronic Health Record (EHR)?"
The simplest answer to the question, “What is an Electronic Health Record (EHR)?” is that it will contain patient health information from their entire life, instead of only the information that a certain doctor or specialist has gathered. This means that instead of having to ship or fax paper files between doctors, each patient will have one central electronic file that contains information on patient demographics, problems, medications, progress made in treatment, vital signs, past procedures that have been performed, immunizations, lab results, and radiology reports.
If you’ve been asking yourself and your friends “What is an Electronic Health Record (EHR)?” you should know that it represents a big way that technological advances can make medical treatment more efficient and accurate. It won’t matter whether you’ve forgotten that you were treated for an infection when you were a teenager, or that you’re on a certain type of medicine that might interfere with your new prescription, because your doctor will have all that information readily available when they pull up your complete electronic file. This will help to provide more accurate diagnoses that take into account your whole medical history, instead of just what you’ve told the doctor.
