While many agree that electronic health records offer greater benefits than paper health records, electronic health records are not without flaws. Click on read more to know about EHR software.

Here are some of the key differences between paper records and electronic documents:

1) Security: 

• Some believe that paper documents can be more prone to compromise due to intrusion, loss of a paper document due to human error, or damage to paper documents due to a natural disaster with thousands of medical records.

2) Time: 

• Some providers have informed that EHRs save them 10 to 20 hours of documentation per week, giving them more time to spend with their patients.

• However, others argue that EHRs are a learning curve and require vendors or have staff to do the data entry. 

• Some argue that doctors focus on the computer, not the patient, by clicking and typing in the room.

3) Environment: 

• Digitizing medical records saves a lot of paper because a case's medical record normally consists of hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages.

4) Cost: 

• Large healthcare organizations may have to pay a billion dollars or more to buy and install EHR systems, and the technology can take months to implement. There can also be long-term digital storage costs associated with EHR. 

• Paper documents require more humane filing management: storage and organization to access them and physical space costs. 

• Any healthcare organization needs a meaningful cost analysis to compare spending and saving with EHR systems.