An electronic health record is a central hub for all your medical information. Notes, prescriptions, test results are all housed in a digital file, so your doctors can call them up anytime. The idea is to make it easier to access records, and prevent them from getting lost.
Speaking yesterday at Cuyahoga Community College, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said the medical field is still catching up to other industries.
SEBELIUS: If you still had to write a check and wait till the bank opened to get cash…you swipe an ATM card. If you run a small grocery store and were still ordering inventory with a paper checklist, mailing it to somebody…I mean we have a medical system—almost 17 percent of our GDP—still stuck in the pen and pencil era.
Sebelius says electronic records can improve care, lower costs, and make the health system more transparent and efficient.
She praised the state’s leadership in adoption of electronic health records, and cited a national push to go digital.
SEBELIUS: We have a recent Centers for Disease Control study and the data indicates that 52 percent of office-based physicians are intending to take advantage of an electronic health record. And 34 percent have already adopted electronic records in their practice. Now that still sounds like we have a long way to go and we do, but that’s double the number of just two years ago.
In Ohio, 6, 745 doctors have committed to or are actually using electronic health records, according to a recent report from the Ohio Health Information Partnership, the state-designated organization responsible for assisting physicians with information technology. No comparison figures were available from years past.