Thoughts on EMRs

I am currently attending a meeting on EMRs. This has retard my blogging, but I have a short time today to share one major concept. One speaker in discussing EMRs suggested the following stages of adoption:

• Substitutive
• Innovative
• Transformative

Substitutive refers to just turning our paper record into an electronic equivalent. This certainly works, but may not really add much – and detract in terms of physician data entry.

Innovative means being able to do things not easily doable with a paper record. This might include drug interaction alerts, or dosing alerts (when patient has an elevated creatinine). It might even be as simple as beinig able to view lab data on a graph.

Transformative is the state which we would like to achieve. This state implies thinking outside the box and developing new ideas about health care delivery and quality assurance. Only when we have data in computerized form, can we start to transform health care. And we must for the good of patient care.