What is the Message of EHR?

Allen (2019) correctly stated that technology affects the way individuals communicate, learn, and think. However, we must also consider the impact of technology on man. For Savat (2012) the impact depends on whether technology is treated neutrally as a tool for some purposeful use or if it is treated as a non-neutral force that always influences society regardless of its proposed uses.

In the same manner, Electronic Health Records (EHR) and other Health Information Technologies (HIT) must also be based on their usage: a tool only for good or neither good nor bad.

EHR is not a recent technology. It is over 60 years old, and it was first called clinical information systems (CIS). The first CIS was developed by Lockheed in 1965 and, through its many iterations, has now become what we know as Allscripts. (Atherton, 2011).

Medicine is always transitioning. Physicians are looking for mechanisms where medical knowledge and information processing capacity can be accessed readily for use for patient care. EHRs were the tools that were identified to address that need. There were three problems EHR was trying to solve, according to McDonald (1999)

1. to eliminate the logistical problems of the paper records by making clinical data immediately available to users wherever they are,

2. to reduce the work of clinical bookkeeping required to manage patients, and

3. to make the informational “gold” in the medical record accessible to clinical, epidemiological, outcomes, and management research. These are very notable and are patient centered.

The message that EHR wants to convey to patients is "to foster precision medicine" (Evans, 2016).

Reference

McDonald, C., https://www.linkedin.com/redir/general-malware-page?url=et%2eal (1999). The Regenstrief Medical Record System: a quarter century experience. International Journal Of Medical Informatics, 54(3), 225-253.

Savat D. (2012). The Uncoding the Digital: Technology, Subjectivity and Action in the Control Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]