Mastering Electronic Health Record in Global Health Care

Background

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).