Latecomers to the Electronic Health Record Table

摘要

Just as the telephone was in its infancy in 1876 and not a soul would consider the possibility that we might all carry one around with us, and talk without wires 130 years later, so the Electronic Health Record (EHR) is in its infancy in the second decade of the twenty first century. The struggle to achieve the EHR will last for decades and cost billions of Euro. In Ireland we start from a low base, and we now have very few resources available to us. This means that our progress will be slow and that the gap will widen between our health information systems and those in Europe and the USA.The article on malpractice issues around adoption of the EHR in the USA discusses; implementation problems, the risks of hybrid paper and electronic systems, information overload, audit trails and logs and clinical decision support. These are risks that need to be recognised and managed and the paper does a balanced job of highlighting the issues. It finishes with the sentence "