The evolution of electronic medical records

No clinical computing topic is being given more attention than that of electronic medical records. Health care organizations, finding that they do not have systems adequate for answering questions crucial to strategic planning and for remaining competitive with other provider groups, are looking to information technologies for help. Many institutions are developing integrated clinical workstations, which provide a single point of entry for access to patient-related, administrative, and research information. At the heart of the evolving clinical workstation lies the medical record in a new incarnation: electronic, accessible, confidential, secure, acceptable to clinicians and patients, and integrated with other, non-patient-specific information. The author describes the problems associated with paper-based record keeping and the promise of the electronic medical record, emphasizing the areas of clinical trials and decision support. He then discusses the issues that must be addressed and the requirements that must be met if electronic medical record systems are to move beyond intranet environments within single health systems or practices and to integrate with regional, national, and international resources via the Internet.