Faculty of Science COMP8760: Electronic Medical Records Report

This report delves into the complexities of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems. It begins by identifying the responsible factors that contribute to the difficulties in building EMR systems, considering technological, organizational, and management perspectives. The report then examines the various challenges encountered during the different stages of EMR system building, such as user requirement determination, data categorization, and system installation. Finally, the report highlights the business and social benefits of digitizing medical records, including improved physician efficiency, cost savings in administrative roles, and enhanced access to patient medical history for medical insurers. The report references various studies to support its findings.

Running head: ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS
Electronic Medical Records
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS
Table of Contents
1. Responsible Factors for difficulties in building EMR Systems...................................................2
2. Difficulties in stages of building EMR Systems..........................................................................3
3. Businesses and Social Benefits of Digitizing Medical Records..................................................4
References........................................................................................................................................5

2ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS
1. Responsible Factors for difficulties in building EMR Systems
From the technological perspective, the big hurdle of building EMR systems is based on
determining the proper provider of such kind of technological services. The different providers
might be able to build customized services that might not be able to communicate or provide
interface with the pre-existing systems.
Costs of procuring such kind of technological services is another major concern. The
pace at which changes are being developed is also taken into consideration. With the rate at
which technological based services are being changing, it would be considered as highly
important to determine whether the small providers of healthcare services have such level of
resources and expertise for securing and maintaining the new kind of EMR system. The
challenges based on securing the records of medical purposes is because this facility is costly in
nature.
From the organizational perspective, the evidence for resisting against changes to the
current systems primarily creates an establishment over the high cost of restricting. This would
include the major form of increase in the area concerning budgets and increase in the employee
workloads (Alley et al. 2016). The payback period for the implementation of an EMR system is
considered to be huge, which can be considered as the major struggle for companies to reap the
benefits in the future.
From the management perspective, one of the obvious challenge is that data within the
system is stored online, which would make use of the Internet (Wei and Denny 2015). The
identification of security and privacy is the biggest concern for organizations to deal with them
and bring in efficient systems for managing them accordingly.

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2. Difficulties in stages of building EMR Systems
The stages of system building that would be the most difficult for the building of EMR
Systems are discussed as follows:
1. Determination of user requirements for each individual healthcare service provider
would pose challenges. The gathering of user requirements for each individual provider can be
determined as highly costly in nature. Determination of medical standards, their application and
the kind of data that would need to be stored is the biggest challenge (Darwish et al. 2019). In
this context, another primary issue is based on the determination of taxonomy that are used
within the various medical institutions.
2. Since there is large text context based on different kind of medical records, hence there
would be a need for understanding the ways in which the data would be categorised and
organized.
3. Development of client side tools and applications is considered as another form of
challenge for the software developers to design a fully configured system. There is also a certain
for uncertainties within the system based on implementing the systems at each of the hospitals.
4. The installation of the EMR systems at the hospitals might be considered the next
challenge because hospitals and pathological departments might not have the proper
infrastructure. There would also be a difficulty to high kind of emergency and backup servers
that would need to be made available (Li et al. 2015). Loss of data corruption and implementing
proper methods and security measures that would need to be used and implemented is a serious
matter of concern.

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3. Businesses and Social Benefits of Digitizing Medical Records
There are many kind of businesses and social benefits based on digitizing the medical
records. These are discussed as follows:
1. For physicians, it would be helpful for reducing the amount of form filling options and
manual based paper scheduling system. With the help of digitized medical records, physicians
would be able to perform many operations in an efficient manner (Weeger, Ohmayer and
Gewald 2015). The digitized records would be able to create a full form of access to the history
of patient backgrounds and hence physicians would be able to provide accurate information
about the diagnosis.
2. The roles of people employed at the administrative sector based on form filling and
keeping records would become insignificant. There would thus be significant form of cost
savings that would be discussed as important and better than the paper based medical records.
3. Medical insurers would have a maximum amount of opportunity as they would be able
to view the entire medical history of patients. This would help them in providing better kind of
suggestions by researching over their medical deficiencies and managing their needs accordingly
(Wang, Kung and Byrd 2018). With the proper management of medical records, the medical
insurers would be able to gain better profit margins while also be able to suggest the better
premium to the registered patients.

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References
Alley, D.E., Asomugha, C.N., Conway, P.H. and Sanghavi, D.M., 2016. Accountable health
communities—addressing social needs through Medicare and Medicaid. N Engl J Med, 374(1),
pp.8-11.
Darwish, A., Hassanien, A.E., Elhoseny, M., Sangaiah, A.K. and Muhammad, K., 2019. The
impact of the hybrid platform of internet of things and cloud computing on healthcare systems:
opportunities, challenges, and open problems. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized
Computing, 10(10), pp.4151-4166.
Li, Y.C.J., Yen, J.C., Chiu, W.T., Jian, W.S., Syed-Abdul, S. and Hsu, M.H., 2015. Building a
national electronic medical record exchange system–experiences in Taiwan. Computer methods
and programs in biomedicine, 121(1), pp.14-20.
Wang, Y., Kung, L. and Byrd, T.A., 2018. Big data analytics: Understanding its capabilities and
potential benefits for healthcare organizations. Technological Forecasting and Social
Change, 126, pp.3-13.
Weeger, A., Ohmayer, L. and Gewald, H., 2015. Operational Alignment in Hospitals-The Role
of Social Capital between IT and Medical Departments.
Wei, W.Q. and Denny, J.C., 2015. Extracting research-quality phenotypes from electronic health
records to support precision medicine. Genome medicine, 7(1), p.41.