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What is an EMR system
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An EMR (or EPR electronic patient record or EHR electronic health record or CPR computer-based patient record) is one or more computerized clinical information systems that collects, stores, and displays patient information. An EMR supports data retrieval for quality assessment activities, research, and practice improvement initiatives. One of the most powerful benefits of an EMR is computerized clinical decision support for clinicians. Clinical decision support alerts the clinician to key information that may affect the patient's progress if certain orders or interventions are implemented, or points the practitioner to clinical data indicating that a course of action may be contraindicated. Moreover, an EMR system provides physicians with a powerful system of clinical data analysis with multipatient researches with performance indicator per pathology or per therapy in a specific period of time.
The potential to improve patient care and significantly influence patient outcomes is generally the principal reason for implementing an EMR. The advantages to patient care-improved legibility, elimination of redundant data entry and the potential for error inherent therein, data retrieval, concurrent access to the medical record in multiple locations, research, etc-are compelling and difficult to overlook.
However, the current EMR systems that are generally webbased applications always connected to the server (online mode) through wired network:
- are specialistic in terms of ward (a cardiology EMR system can't be suitable for an orthopedics ward) or in terms of functions (the EMR that covers specific administrative functions has different features compared to a Clinical Decision Support EMR system)
- they are filled only at the end of the patient period in hospital
- often by people that are not the physician or nurse that followed the clinical events
- through transcription from paper patient record to the system with redundancy of potential errors
- using a desktop PC, far from patient's bedside
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