Patients' safety in the era of EMR/EHR automation

- EHR encompasses information regarding patient care such as demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, medical history, immunizations, laboratory data, and imaging reports which can be easily accessed at multiple sites to make health care accessible for patients.
- While implementing an EHR with best features for supporting physicians is the responsibility of the healthcare organization, using it in a meaningful way is solely dependent on the physician.
- Real-time testing of EHRs in working environment when combined with proper training from the vendors is needed to get the best from the EHRs.

Accurate maintenance of the medical records of patients has become a worldwide problem with the rapid rise in the count of patients. Furthermore, providing them adequate health care keeping their safety in view is turning into a great challenge for physicians. As such, electronic health records (EHRs) were developed to solve these issues by aiding physicians in imparting quality health care to patients as well as maintaining their safety. Nonetheless, rather than increasing their efficiency, EHRs have become a burden for the physicians as they ultimately increase their error rate and reduce output rate affecting patient safety. As health-IT is advancing progressively, new features are added to the existing EHRs with the aim to support physicians in providing better healthcare. Till date, some of the most advanced features include clinical support decision system (CDSS), computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system, health information exchange (HIE), mobile documentation application, and a system of safety alerts on a dashboard. Proper training to the physicians on judiciously usage of these EHR functions is required to extract maximum benefit. Else, these can introduce a considerable number of medical errors, which can result in fatal outcomes for the patients.

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