Twenty Years ago, there was no concept of electronic health records. Doctors used paper-based systems and spent countless hours, filling out hundreds of thousands of papers every year. Consequently, they had less time, then they do now, to actually focus on the patient.

Then, there was a revolution; A revolution of computers, of information technology and the exchange of that information. While every industry benefitted from the Digital Age, the healthcare industry was slow in adopting the information technology systems to streamline, enhance, improve and deliver better quality patient care. However, through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, the U.S. government took the first step towards changing the face of this industry. Work began on developing software that would assist medical practices all across the country in performing their tasks more efficiently, streamline their workflows and provide better patient care.

The government put in the required legal framework to support the industry, and although the progress of moving towards electronic healthcare solutions was slow in the beginning, it was on the right track.

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) were the first to surface, but while they had many benefits, they had limited functionality and doctors still needed to do a lot of paperwork themselves for billing and managing their practices. They often needed to communicate manually with laboratories, government entities, pharmacies and the like.

Then came the concept of Electronic Health Records. This concept, without a shadow of doubt, completely revamped the otherwise laborious and difficult method of keeping paper-based records. The best feature of an EHR, interoperability, is the single-most important factor in alleviating the many headaches practices used to face due to paper-based systems. Not only can the practices can communicate with labs, pharmacies and hospitals, but, whenever needed, they can demonstrate their compliance with the legal requirements to the government. But the process of EHR adoption still has a long way to go before it can be claimed, without any fear of contradiction, that it has changed the industry for good. Many practices across the United States are still relying on paper-based systems, mostly because of cost-related problems in implementing EHR systems, and also because they have relied on this system for ages and simply, are just not ready to accept the change and keep up pace with the industry.

Let’s try and analyze whether EHRs are indeed more reliable and secure than paper-based systems.

Complete data

First and foremost, EHRs help practices get complete patient data, which sometimes can be missed while filling out the paper-based documents. EHRs have built-in procedures for data validation to make sure that no key information is missed while recording vitals and key patient information.

Multiple backups

Another advantage of using EHR systems is that they are based on Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing allows practices to access their information from anywhere in the world, through any system. Also, there’s no risk of data loss as well. The providers usually have multiple backups of important data and there’s virtually no chance of ever losing it.

Multiple layers of security

Since EHRs are computer-based, many layers of security can be implemented when accessing patients’ key data. Compared to paper-based systems, where anyone can have access to the important patient data, EHRs are certainly more reliable when it comes to security.

Improved quality of care

Paper-based systems, at the end of the day, do not provide the practitioners with anything meaningful to rely on when making important decisions. On the other hand, EHRs can interact with many industry stakeholders simultaneously, and inform the decision making process in providing the best quality of care to the patients. This not only helps in improved decision making, but also in decisions about any particular practice.

Reduction in errors

Since paper-based systems are controlled largely by humans, there is always a risk of human error. Any wrong ICD-10 code or any mistake in recording important information can be fatal. EHRs ensure that any seemingly wrong information is scanned for validation and that corrections are suggested. Doctors have shown a great deal of trust in EHRs and their concerns about the difficulty of the system and it’s interoperability have gone down considerably in the last one year, according to a recent report published by Accenture.

These were some of the factors that suggest that EHRs are indeed more reliable than paper based systems. Reliability is one of the biggest reasons EHRs are being rapidly implemented by practitioners across the country, and will undoubtedly lead the way forward in the next decade. With continuous development going on in healthcare industry, we can safely assume that the patient healthcare is in good hands.