Advantages of EHR over Paper Records

The electronic health record app has definitely seen a growth in usage this decade thanks to Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2014. The Act made EHRs a requirement in healthcare centers all over the US. However, many hospitals have been slow to act on this due to their preference for the traditional paper record system. 

Although the initial cost of implementing an EHR system in a hospital is quite high, the benefits that it provides, in the long run, is definitely something worth noting.

 Let us review some of them. 

Perhaps the most obvious advantage of EHR over paper records is that it needs less physical space, as all of the information is stored on cloud servers. One server can contain thousands of patient files, which would need a large physical area if they were in paper. 

Medical records are required by law to be kept from between five to ten years after a patient’s most recent treatment, discharge, or after their death. One can only imagine just how many paper files are accumulated in a short period of time, especially in busier hospitals.

No matter how organized a paper record management system is, it will always take a considerable amount of time to search for a particular file. The EHR system’s network allows both hospital staff and patients to have the data they need on short notice through a mobile app or a computer, leading to an increase in efficiency in most if not all of the hospital’s departments.

The danger of physically losing paper records is very real, especially when the amount of files being kept has accumulated. 

The theft of paper records is highly unlikely -- the files are in bigger danger of being misplaced due to negligence or destroyed in a natural calamity. It will be harder to restore compared to a digital file. 

Though fewer in number compared to other mHealth apps, it’s no surprise that some of the best medical apps for Android and iOS are EHR-related. Although digital systems still have improvements to make in order to be fully embraced by healthcare providers, there’s no longer a denial that the future of medicine is expected to become digitally inclined.

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