This chapter describes the overview of electronic health record (EHR); the trends and issues with EHR; EHR and clinical decision support system (CDSS); the trust and privacy concerns of EHR systems; and the significance of EHR in global health care. EHR systems are very important in health care settings and have the potential to transform the health care system from a mostly paper-based industry to the one that utilizes the clinical data and other pieces of information to assist health care providers in delivering the higher quality of care to their patients. EHRs and their ability to electronically exchange health information can help health care providers effectively provide higher quality and safer care for patients while creating tangible enhancements in global health care.
TopBackground
In recent years, one of the most important applications of IT in the field of health care is EHR (Farzandipour, Sadoughi, Ahmadi, & Karimi, 2010). A growing capacity of IT in the collection, storage, and transmission of information has added a great deal of concerns since electronic records can be accessed by numerous consumers at various locations (Farzandipour, Ahmadi, Sadoughi, & Karimi, 2011). The digitization of health care typically has emphasized electronic records for patients (Raghupathi & Kesh, 2009). Advancements in information and communication technology (ICT) have led to the development of various forms of EHR to support general practitioners and health care providers in capturing, storing, and retrieving the routinely collected medical records and clinical information for the optimal primary care and translational research in modern health care (Bonney, 2016).
The increase in EHR implementation in all treatment venues has led to the greater demands for integration across health care practice settings with different work cultures (Sherer et al., 2015). EHR implementations may present challenges to patient safety and health care workflow (Colligan, Potts, Finn, & Sinkin, 2015). With growing adoption and use, EHR represents a rich source of clinical data that offers many benefits for secondary use in biomedical research (Rasmussen, 2014). The collected health care data plays a crucial role to ensure the effective statistical analysis in the health care organizations (Arfaoui & Akaichi, 2016). Wuyts et al. (2012) indicated that EHR systems are being developed to enable the electronic storing and sharing of medical data among health care practitioners. Patient records are the central parts of health care and hospitals (Bossen, 2011). EHR presents an opportunity to access the large stores of data for health care research (Griffith et al., 2015).