IT in the Healthcare Industry

Doctors, nurses, health administrators and patients; are you tired of the endless paperwork that is associated with any and all visit to the doctor’s office or hospital? Well the time has some for the health industry to revolutionize the way that it conducts its day-to-day practices. Information technology has become essential to improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare. In hospitals and doctors offices throughout the world, health professionals are adopting Electronic Health Records (EHR) that increase the quality of care, while reducing the costs.

The status quo has for a long time been the paper charts that would track information about each and every patient, and be filed in seemingly endless filing cabinets. This system was time consuming, error prone, and used an absurd amount of paper and space. Doctors would have to write down their visit with the patient, and then have the nurses decipher their handwriting, which would then be delivered to billing, the laboratory, and back to its rightful place in the filing cabinet. This is a system that has worked for a long time now, however technology has been developed that can greatly increase patient care and efficiency.

Electronic Health Records will allow health professionals to keep an up to date medical record of each patient that can simply be pulled up on a computer. This will allow the doctor to access the patients information without the need for a courier, and will also allow them to send for prescriptions, lab tests, and to send the proper coding to billing, all which will help both the doctor and patient. A new system has been implement at my hospital, Anne Arundel Medical Center, as we have recognized the almost limitless capabilities of this new technology. Essentially this is a network that instantly connects the professionals with all of the information they need to provide the best care they can to the patients.

Besides providing the best quality of care, Electronic Heath Records will help to reduce the cost of healthcare. This is a major concern in the profession as well as a topic of major debate in our government as health costs continue to mount. President Obama has stressed that our healthcare system must adapt to reduce the costs and that Electronic Health Records is one technology that will help use achieve our goals as an industry.