HCI 655 Electronic Health Records

1: EHR stands for Electronic Health Record where health records of the patient is entered and maintained online so that he can consult a qualified doctor anytime living anywhere in the world. Patients previous health record data is recorded in EHR which helps doctor to give better prescription

Due to EHR doctors can easily view patients past medical history and can also track their health in future which is very difficult in case of medical records on paper. Using EHR doctors will get accurate data regarding patient health record, which enable faster and better treatment.

2: With the implementation of EHR in health sector huge advancement has made in the sector:

• The patient can access the doctor anytime sitting anywhere in the world in case of an emergency
• Due to EHR there has been less error in medical records saving patient from keeping all the paperwork of their health record
• Having medical record of the patient on EHR reduces the duplication of the medical test thus saving patients time and money.
• Various hospitals overcharge the patients for the treatment. Getting treated on EHR decreases billing process time and also creates accurate billing system (Marcotte et al. ,2012). 

3: EHR has huge scope which can bring revolution in health sector of the country but managing EHR is not a easy task various challenges is faced in installing EHR:

The cost of installing is EHR is over one lakh dollar and maintaining cost of the software increases over sixty thousand dollars per year the data implies that huge investment is required to set up the EHP thus it cannot be afforded by every hospital

The health record data of patients is stored online thus there is huge possibility of leakage of the sensitive data if the software firewall is not strong  According to the data of Protenus Breach Barometer 25 million patient health data were compromised in month of October 2016.the data rised up to  57 million in  next month November which were the most data leakage in a month. Therefore the data implies that the world is still not ready for this technology and need better software to use as EHR (Terry,2012).

The EHR software needs timely upgrade if the software becomes poor and unreliable then there is the chance of data breach (Bayley et al., 2013). 

4: When a patient health is critical and he requires immediate doctor attention or certain person is living in remote area where proper medical facility is not available then he can use EHR to consult the doctor and get proper medical attention. Various softwares like Advanced Life Support (ACLS) simulators, Electronic medical records (EMR) are some of the apps used in this field. These software uses internet technologies to operate their task thus internet plays the major role in the field of health sector to connect the patients.

5: The software used for EHR may be updated, reliable with strong firewall but there is still chance of data leakage it is because of setting weak password as passwords are the first line of defense to protect data from unauthorized access. Therefore following should be done for password management:

• The password of the software should be long and strong so that hackers are not able to decode it
• Using different password for different account
• Using password management application which provide one consistent interface to generate, save and to access all passwords (Sun &Chen & Lin, 2012). 

References

Bayley, K. B., Belnap, T., Savitz, L., Masica, A. L., Shah, N., & Fleming, N. S. (2013). Challenges in using electronic health record data for CER: experience of 4 learning organizations and solutions applied. Medical care, 51, S80-S86.

Marcotte, L., Seidman, J., Trudel, K., Berwick, D. M., Blumenthal, D., Mostashari, F., & Jain, S. H. (2012). Achieving meaningful use of health information technology: a guide for physicians to the EHR incentive programs. Archives of internal medicine, 172(9), 731-736.

Sun, H. M., Chen, Y. H., & Lin, Y. H. (2012). oPass: A user authentication protocol resistant to password stealing and password reuse attacks. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 7(2), 651-663.

Terry, N. P. (2012). Protecting patient privacy in the age of big data. UMKC L. Rev., 81, 385.