EHR Benefit – Accessibility of Charts

It’s time for the second installment in my series of posts looking at the long list of EHR benefits. In case you missed the first post, go and check out the EHR benefit of legible notes.

Accessibility of Charts
The second EHR benefit is similar to the Legibility of Notes benefit in that it is easily forgotten as a benefit to EHR and it can be hard to quantify the value of the benefit in dollar amounts. Plus, it is really easy to see how nice accessible charts are to an organization.

There are a number of ways to look at the EHR benefit of accessible charts. The most obvious one is when you think about the number of times a chart has gone missing in a clinic. In most cases, the chart isn’t really missing. It’s in the clinic somewhere, but no one can find it. Remember all those special places that a chart could hide: exam room, physician’s desk, front desk, nurse’s desk, lab sign off box, physician’s car, hospital, physician’s home, etc etc etc. Oh yes, I didn’t even mention HIM not being able to find the chart because someone (probably someone other than HIM) misfiled the paper chart.

I’m sure most HIM people who read this will have a visceral reaction. I’m sure many are likely thinking, “But we do an amazing job keeping track of all those paper charts.” I agree with them 100%. A good HIM person has done an amazing job keeping track of paper charts. It would be 100 times worse if they weren’t there. The problem is that if a dozen people are using the paper chart, the reality is that charts are going to go missing.

Now think about the concept when it comes to EHR. None of those lost chart locations exist. The nurse can’t accidentally take the chart and forget to file it. The doctor can’t forget the chart at home or in his car. No one can misfile the chart.

Think about it. An EHR solves 100% of the problem of missing paper charts.

Besides misplaced paper charts, the idea of chart accessibility is an important one when you consider the idea of accessing an EHR remotely. Even if you use a less than ideal remote desktop solution, a physician can access an EHR anywhere they have an internet connection. For web based EHR, you get exactly the same experience accessing the EHR remotely as you would in the office.

I’ve heard horror stories (at least their pretty horrible to me) of doctors getting late night patient calls which require them to get dressed, go into the office, open the medical records room to access a patient chart. With an EHR, that same workflow has the doctor booting his computer and logging into the EHR. This doesn’t apply to all doctors, but for those that do it’s a dramatic difference.

The biggest fear I’ve heard from doctors in this regard is they often equate chart accessibility with their accessibility. The argument goes that if they can access the chart 24/7, that it also means they have to work 24/7. I think this is a myth that doesn’t match most realities. Just because you had a key to your office and could go and work on paper charts 24/7 doesn’t mean you had to do it. The same is true with remote access to EHR. You choose when is appropriate and important to access and work on the EHR and when not to do so.

The key difference between EHR and paper charts is that when you do want to access a patient’s record remotely you have that option available to you. That doesn’t mean you always have to do so, but it is nice to have that option available.

When talking about EHR accessibility, I think also about the landscape of connected mobile devices (smart phones, tablets, etc). All of these devices are connected to the internet at all times and could provide a doctor access to their EHR almost anywhere in the world. Try doing that with paper.

The problem here is that most EHR don’t do well on mobile devices. Remote desktop from a smart phone or tablet works, but is a pretty terrible user experience. A native mobile app provides a much better experience for users, but we’re still in the early days of EHR mobile app development. As this matures, the accessibility of charts will become an even bigger EHR benefit.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

4 Comments

  • John,

    When you talk about chart accessibility, there is another aspect of that worth discussing. How one can put the data in the ‘chart’ to work. In a paper chart – forget it. In a well designed EHR, trends and comparisons between trends can be analyzed.

    For instance, imagine a patient with a chronic disease of which relatively little is known in the way of effective treatment. Plus a physician who wants to improve treatments and document such. He tries a variety of treatments – different drugs at different dosages and frequencies, some together, some not. A paper record means that tracking and charting results has to be done by hand, and in real life that tends to not happen. It becomes easy to miss the benefits of certain choices as a result, whereas an EHR might make such analysis far more practical to conduct.

    An EHR can not just benefit the individual patient, it can also help the researcher gather and consolidate data that could help many other patients.

  • Great additions Carl and R Troy. Multiple user accessibility is huge. Plus, the way data is used is a huge benefit to an EHR over paper. That might be it’s own EHR benefit.

  • John,

    Every time I watch this one doctor, the head of Oncology and Hematology at a local hospital try to go through a very thick file to figure out what is going on with a certain patient, I cringe. He’s very smart and knows his medicine. But the quality of his work is highly impaired by his dependence on nearly useless paper records in a practice where each patient generates piles and piles of paper. And it completely destroys his ability to do appropriate research and come up with viable results.

    Ron

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