You are drinking your morning coffee before leaving for work when the background of TV news startles you into full awareness. A tornado touched down in your city, and among those collapsed and ruined buildings, you recognize your office. You immediately know that you will not be working from there today and you have no access to your patients’ records. Questions race through your head: How will I reach my patients? Who needs which treatment? Where are they in their regimens? Which patients do I need to contact today? Tomorrow? And the day after? It goes without saying that patients who miss treatments will suffer serious consequences. It sounds dramatic, but many practices have had to deal with the consequences of natural and man-made disasters such as fires, flooding, earthquakes and hurricanes and their impact on patient records. Even without these disasters, patient records can get lost or misplaced.Luckily, the group whose building was damaged by the tornado
had a full online system with protected servers. The physicians and staff were able to access patient records immediately, contact nearby facilities, get in touch with their patients, and arrange for alternative care. For them, residual disasters were averted. Avoiding disaster is just one of the ways healthcare providers benefit from electronic access to patient records. How many times have you needed access to charts while you were at home, on vacation, or at the hospital making your rounds? Details such as dosing information or illegible handwritten prescriptions can have major effects when errors occur. An oncology practice-specific electronic medical record (EMR) system can help you get around these issues, as well as better promote available clinical trials and get the most out of pay-for-performance guidelines.
Electronic Medical Records
An electronic medical record system keeps track of such medical information as patient history, appointment details, prescriptions, drug interactions, and billing. Paper medical charting goes back to the early 1900’s, when Dr. Henry Plummer at the Mayo clinic pioneered patient data records. The electronic version of the patient chart has been around since 1969, when Dr. Lawrence Weed of the University of Vermont,
who introduced the problem-oriented medical record into medical practice, went on to develop a model computerized record. The Indiana University School of Medicine implemented one of the first electronic medical records systems in the early 1970’s, one still in use today.
