Making the Paper-to-Digital Shift in India: Acceptance and Adoption of Electronic Health Records System (EHRs) by Physicians

Electronic Medical Record (Emr)

Electronic Medical Record is an electronic record system used by the medical practitioners to record the clinical information of their patients, including identification details, prescriptions, laboratory test results, etc. (World Health Organization and Regional Office for the Western Pacific 2006).

EMR is potentially one of the major accelerators in the transformation of healthcare with regard to technology and its acceptance. From a patient care standpoint, EMR generally improves the accuracy of information, supports clinical decision-making and improves the accessibility of information for continuity of care. Ober KP and Applegate WB (2015) opine from an operational perspective that EMR provide essential healthcare statistics, pivotal for the planning and management of healthcare services. A good EMR shall have to meet several expectations, like meticulous patient documentation, common templates, regulatory compliance, prevention of medication errors, order sets, disease coding, billing, clinical pathway utilization, medico-legal defensibility, adaptive learning capability, optimized workflow, simplicity, incorporation of clinical images, multiple input interfaces (notes, test reports, etc.), seamless connectivity among clinical investigation platforms, input speed at the point of entry, and the most important of all, data compilation for analysis and research, all with time-efficiency and effectiveness with a user- and patient-friendly interface, Zhang X (2016) Ober KP, Applegate WB (2015).