And should you care?

The answer is an absolute yes. There are a number of benefits to you, your doctor and society when a high quality EMR’s is used. Some of these benefits are:

For you:

• Your doctor can track and plot your progress.
• The doctor can find information faster and therefore is able to more accurately diagnose your ailments.
• With e-Prescribing (which is part of all quality EMR’s), not only will you not have to wait at the pharmacy as long, there is a much smaller chance of misprescribed medications and misread dosages.

For your Doctor:

• Typically a physician is able to increase his patient volume by 10-20% while improving quality and satisfaction.
• Elimination of the cost of the paper charts, staffing cost to pull and file them and the real estate needed to house them.
• The elimination of the cost of transcription which ranges from $500 to $2000 per month.

For Society at Large:

(In order to be truly effective, the majority of medical practices will need to run a high quality EMR, and these EMR’s will need to be able to connect to a health information exchange (HIE))

• Reductions in the huge cost of medical errors
• Reduction in redundant medical tests between specialties that a patient may see during the course of care.
• Better coordination of care between different specialties.

In summary, encouraging your physician to move to an EMR will benefit everyone.