Electronic Health Record Systems For Healthcare Providers

Abstract

All healthcare organizations, clinics and hospitals need their own information system to maintain patient data. So standards have to be provided for data exchange. Electronic health records therefore have to be standardized, with semantic interoperability. EHRs would need to be designed to capture useful clinical data using standardized data definitions and standardized measures of quality. These will assist in enhancing preventive care and physician efficiency. These kinds of inaccuracies in the attribute values of patient records make it hard to locate certain patient records. Information gathered in different systems may be non-coherent or may contain conflicting information. The desired information may be entirely absent. For instance, the unit for temperature may not be input definitely as degree Celsius or degree Fahrenheit, or may be beyond the allowable range. Thus, there is a requirement for a communication format and protocol for standardization purposes, as a patient's health data is exchanged in a multi-disciplinary setting. There is a need to enable interoperability between vendors' software. Standardization will improve the quality of EHR.