The EMR refers to everything you expect to find in a paper chart, like diagnoses, immunization dates, medical history, and allergies. EMRs are limited because they only work well within the practice and don’t easily travel well outside the practice.
According to TrueNorth EMR Consulting, EMRs today are being used by many healthcare organizations in both the US and Europe to improve the quality of health services. However, developing countries have a challenge in implementing EMRs because of their poor infrastructure.
Because of the popularity and well-known benefits EMRs, maternity hospitals have started to adopt their usage. This practice is common in healthcare organizations in the US and Europe. Here are some of the reasons why EMRs should be used in maternity hospitals.
Paper records are limited
Handwritten records cannot be transferred electronically or stored, and this means that both the mother and baby’s information is at risk. This information is usually not structured, hence cannot be shared with other computers and systems.
This limits the ability of the maternity hospitals to exchange information regarding the mother and the baby. This, in turn, means that the mother will find it hard to access healthcare services from different healthcare facilities because of this.
Improving efficiency and productivity
The primary goal of EMRs is to make patient information available to whoever needs it, when they need it and wherever they need it. Maternity hospitals with EMRs can retrieve information regarding their patients more rapidly, thus saving valuable time and money.
Improved quality of care and safety
EMRs can achieve this through the following:
- Improved access to medical data anytime and from anywhere,
- Reminding mothers of pending visits to their clinics and
- Improved legibility to clinical notes.
Improving the trustworthiness level
Previously, the cases of born babies being switched while at the nursery were very rampant. This was attributed to poor record keeping and documentation. However, the introduction of EMRs has done away with this. Hospitals store the information about the born babies electronically, thus reducing the chances of such errors to nil.