Menopause

History and Society: Menopause: According to Fox-Spencer and Brown (2006), menopause is the point when a woman has her last period which happens when her ovaries stop rele...

Implementing Electronic Patient Records

The implementation of electronic patient records is a software based solution that provides for the digital computerization, recording, and maintenance of patient and medical practice information and it deals the need to set up excellence in patient care and practicality in medical practice. It is one of the main tools currently being used to fix the ailing health care system in the developed world through patient monitoring which will enable doctors to shift from only curing ailments to preventing them instead. One of the main goals for using this system is to increase efficiency within the healthcare system to the point of significantly reducing health care costs while saving millions of lives. Over the past several years, health care providers, insurers, drug firms and research institutes have been encouraged to initiate a massive transformation from a paper-based health-care system to one that increasingly relies on electronic records to manage patient data. While this has been easy in developed countries, the same cannot be said concerning developed countries, especially those in Africa.

The increasing number of those who are expected to be regular users of the health care system in Africa has been touted as one of the reasons why digitizing the medical data of patients is very important in managing the already burdened health care system. Putting people’s health information in databases will not only reduce redundancies but is already shifting the way people receive and seek health care. With better contact to an individualized health record, whether it is through an official electronic record by a doctor, a private record created by an individual, or a fast instant messaging contact with a doctor, the customary roles of doctors and patients are experiencing swift changes. It is expected that in the future, patients will arrive for appointments with their doctors having gone through their medical records and the recommended articles about their health concerns.

It is believed that even more people will be able to skip the hospital visit altogether due to their busy schedules and will instead prefer to stay in touch with their doctors through text messaging and emails in order to receive answers for their health concerns. Electronic medical records are the future because in emergencies, such as attending to a patient with a heart attack, finding and reading the paper medical records of a patient costs a lot of time, and this time might be crucial in the saving of the life of this patient. If electronic data is available, then it would be easier to treat whatever medical condition a patient has because the doctors have almost instant access to their medical records, and in fact, the chances of such a patient living would be significantly higher.

Electronic medical records are here to stay because they reduce the chances of physicians making errors in their diagnosis of a patient’s illness due to the fact that they will have the patient’s entire medical history before they start attending on him or her. Although electronic medical records have been said to have saved the lives of many and that there are even higher possibilities of their doing so in future, it still has the problem of cost. Installing an electronic medical records system in a hospital or clinic, for example, can be very expensive and many doctors opt not to do it because of the cost. Unless cheaper ways are found to ensure that electronic data systems are more available to doctors in Africa at cheaper prices, then the future of electronic medical records within it is threatened, not only increasing the risk to the lives of the patients but will also continue to burden the already strained medical health care system as it is today, making medical services even slower.

The problem with having electronic medical records currently is that although many medical practitioners keep electronic records, they have no centralized system through which the patient’s information can be shared and this leads to the same problem as that experienced by the use of the paper system, that is, the loss of time. It is estimated that only a handful of doctors in Africa have the necessary technology to share their patients’ medical information with other medical practitioners and it is believed that the efficient sharing of this information will not be in place for quite a number of years.

The main beneficiaries of the electronic medical records, if implemented in African countries, will be the patients themselves because sometimes, medical and diagnostic errors occur because complete patient information is not available at the time of patient care and doctors are forced to provide care based on a patient’s recollection or in worst cases no information at all. An integrated electronic medical records system could help resolve this problem because doctors will have all the information they need about a patient’s medical history hence reducing the chances of errors occurring.

Furthermore, the use of electronic medical records protects the patient’s privacy from eavesdropping because these records are password protected hence limiting their access to only the patient and their doctor. It has been found that adequate technology is available to protect the patient’s privacy and this can be found cheaply. However, the making of medical records electronic can have some unforeseen effects in the future because even though it is safer in matters of privacy, any breach in the security of the electronic system can completely compromise the privacy of a patient and their information might be available for all to see especially online. With very few controls over the internet, the patient’s medical history and personal information can no longer be kept private.

Improving Healthcare Outcomes

Healthcare outcomes are variations in the condition of the health of an individual or patient due to an intervention. We have selected this topic so that we can discuss why achieving good patient health outcome is the basic purpose of the provision of healthcare. Healthcare outcomes can be applied not only for individuals but also for whole populations as well. The measurement of has over the years become a multi-million dollar industry and this has been due partly to the growing anxiety of the society about their health. The measurement, reporting, and comparison of these outcomes can be considered to be one of the most important steps towards making sure that there is a rapid outcome improvement and that good choices are made about the reduction of costs. The measurements of quality are very common in the production processes but this cab be translated poorly in the health sector because the links between the actions and their outcome are much less direct and there is also the fact that there are some characteristics which make comparison between these two sectors very difficult. Because of this, risk adjustment is a very essential part of the outcome measurements in healthcare and there is evidence that a validated risk adjustment illustration improves the precision of the analysis of outcomes.

The concept of practice based on evidence is founded on the evidence from studies and trials, however, when it comes to outcomes, a very different way of thinking is created. A methodical examination of outcomes can have many advantages by creating performance based verification. An outcome measure has to be valid in order to be useful, that is, it has to assess only what it is supposed to and be reliable, only showing a minimal error. An outcome also needs to be easy to administer, be sensitive to what is being measured and be specific when it comes to identifying those measurements that may be false. The simplest measures to administer are those dealing with process because they rarely show the outcomes of clinical interventions and instead, they only show those dealing with administration. As a basis of healthcare targets, payment for performance schemes often give many hospitals the incentive to focus on administrative processes as opposed to clinical process. The outcomes of clinical processes are very difficult to develop and to implement, although it is a fact that the reported outcomes of patients are much easier to use.

The measurement of healthcare outcomes has now become an essential part of healthcare and those who might use this information ranges from the patients involved to those who make policy on healthcare. No single outcome is sufficient in the measurement of any aspect of healthcare since the various instruments needed to come up with a conclusive measurement have to come from multidisciplinary sources. The best thing is to have a sufficient number of these measures which have been appropriately risk adjusted which can then be measured in order to provide a continuous feedback to those who require the information.