The hospital is a well-known cancer research centre. The doctors and staff are known for their commitment to humanity and are seldom worried about profits.

On a particular day their EMR (Electronic Medical Records) system was down. Doctors who were used to the convenience of seeing patient medical history, prescription, lab reports, PACS, etc or even do historic analysis at the click of a button were suddenly in a state of chaos. They had to go through the huge pile of paper records before deciding on the next treatment plan. The result was an increasing patient consultation time, wait time, cancelled appointments, chaos and frustration.

When I was witness to this episode, I realized the impact that an EMR system had made in the hospital operations.

My memories about EMR go back to an era when EMR was just considered as a replacement to paper records. Simply put it was considered a repository for the following,

1.      Medical History

2.      SOAP Notes

3.      Operative Notes

4.      Encounter Summary

The EMR was received with a lot of resistance initially. While some believed that it was just adding to their administrative tasks, the cost of implementing it, lack of standardization, interoperability challenges just added to some of the cons. Added to this system down time can be an issue.

Today EMR systems have matured to do much more than what they were initially expected to. We have seen features like below that have ensured in delivering better care,

1.      PACS Integration

2.      LIMS Integration

3.      Integration with wearables

4.      Real Time Patient Monitoring through integration with vital signs monitoring devices

With technology-like voice to text, RPA, Generative AI, the usage of EMR will continue to improve while minimizing the deterrents. EMR’s are here to stay and will be part of the healthcare ecosystem.

A word of caution though,

The users, technology services providers and EMR vendors will have to be cautious about the following and put in due diligence,

1.      Data security and privacy

2.      Cyber attacks

3.      Interoperability challenges Remember even the highly structured platform like the NHIN Direct did not succeed.