Doc praises, explains benefits of electronic records

Calling the typical paper-based health record system “a primitive, fragmented and unreliable way to do business,” Rahul Parikh, M.D., writing for the Los Angeles Times, shows how electronic medical records have improved his practice.

Parikh’s piece starts from a foundation of a few electronic interactions with patients and builds a thesis from there:

In the past, these parents would have left a phone message and we probably would have spent the better part of a day or two playing phone tag. Or they would have had to make an appointment, strap their children into car seats, pack diaper bags and snacks and sit in a waiting room full of sick children — only to spend 5 to 10 minutes with me while I told them everything was fine. Instead, we fixed the issues by e-mail, allowing parents to stay in their lives at home and at work.

Parikh says that while EMRs do increase his workload – data entry is far more of a hassle than just scribbling something on a scrap of paper and shoving it into a file – they also allow him to shift between work and home when needed, giving his schedule a flexibility it lacked when he was permanently tied to the office by mountains of paper. While EMRs are “far from perfect,” he writes, they are still a significant improvement over the status quo.

Parikh acknowledges some criticisms of electronic medical records, such as a study that concluded using hand-held PDAs led to an increase in wrong and redudanct diagnoses. He says those errors can be remedied by “holding doctors and others accountable for the accuracy of their documentation.” As far as the security issues surrounding electronic records, he says they are legitimate concerns but no different from those in other industires, such as finance.