Electronic Health Records in Small Ambulatory Practices

Posted: December 23, 2009 at 01:04:10 by Dani Iswara. Words count: 240.
Last updated: December 23, 2009 at 01:04:10.

Some opinions said that health cares invest lest in information technology or IT. See other information-intensive industry such as aviation and banking. To improve quality and efficiency of care, information technology might help. Computerization support, specifically Electronic Health Records or EHR, are adopted in small ambulatory practices. Sometimes called Electronic Medical Records or EMR. Besides their potentiality, there are barriers in some development countries, e.g.:

• Lack of standardization.
• Costs.
• Resistent to change.

EHR should adjustable to the need of small practice environment. All staff and management strategy must be involved in the project. The process of implementing EHR have several stages:

• Decision.
  • Assessment.
  • Planning.
• Selection.
• Pre-implementation.
• Implementation.
• Post-implementation.
  • Evaluation.
  • Improvement.

Identifying a champion user is important. A champion user is individual as a key to a successful implementation process. Could be a decision maker and involved at every stages. The implementation of EHR may vary on:

• Technology.
• Training.
• Leadership.
• The change management process.
• The individual character of each ambulatory practice environment.

Source: How to successfully select and implement EHR in small ambulatory practice (BioMed Central-BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2009).

The journal at BMC is:

an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Based on some debate, there are 5 key policies domains needed:

• Standards.
• Incentives.
• Security and confidentiality.
• Professional involvement.
• Research.

Source: The quality case for IT in healthcare (BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2002).

For the situation in Indonesia, please direct your cursor to: Anis Fuad blog.

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Dani Iswara, mail me: [myfirstnamelastname]@gmail.com.