The last time you went to your doctor, did you feel like the doctor was talking to you, or to the computer in the exam room?  If it hasn’t happened yet, it may in the near future.  With the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, doctors are eventually going to be monetarily penalized if they don’t start using electronic means to track your health.

With the increased use of Electronic Health Records (EHR), many clinics are equipped with computers instead of paper charts and pens. Doctors are challenged with keeping your visits personable, maintaining face-to-face contact while retrieving and entering your information electronically.  It can be hard to keep the proper balance, as most doctors are naturally patient-oriented. They were trained to listen to the patient, ask questions, use their educated mind to process the facts, and advise the patient accordingly with a treatment plan.  Now they not only do what they were trained to do, but they will also be required to enter your information into their PC, which does it’s own processing and comes up with more suggestions to diagnose your illness.

The idea behind Electronic Health Records isn’t to take away that personalized care, but to eliminate medication errors and unnecessary testing, ensure a more thorough exam and create a more complete plan of care.  For example, you may go to your clinic to be seen for a sore ankle, but while you are there your doctor is alerted by your EHR that you never rescheduled the follow up appointment you missed after previous labs came back abnormal.  He can now go over those abnormal labs with you, which may have been overlooked if not for your electronic records.  He may prescribe a medication for that sore ankle, and it will warn him if what he is prescribing interacts with a different medication you are currently taking, or if you are allergic to an ingredient in that medication, or even offer generic alternatives to save you money.

Dr. Jerome Keating is an Urologist at Adult & Pediatric Urology in Sartell, MN who provides the doctor’s perspectives for the clinic’s EHR implementation team.  Regarding some of the challenges he faces with implementing Electronic Health Records, he states, “EHR is a major undertaking for a medical practice. It is costly and requires many hours of preparation, study, and practice. However, once it is fully implemented, the efficiency, accuracy, and quality of the medical records make it worth the investment“.

While the use of Electronic Medical Records may seem impersonal, and it may take your doctors some time to adjust to all the new technology they will be required to use, it is inevitable. It will provide more accuracy, safeguards and reminders about your care, and ultimately assist in providing you with the best healthcare possible. And hopefully, using the computer in the exam room will eventually become as ordinary as using a stethescope to hear your heartbeat.

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