The safety of a patient is one of the major concerns in healthcare delivery. It has been assessed that 40,000 to 90,000 fatalities every year result from medical errors (Kohn et al. , 2000). Such mistakes generate undesirable outcomes that affect the patient, ranging from an extended stay in the hospital to death of the patient (Thomas et al. , 2000). Medical errors are generally caused by several factors, of which includes the insufficiency of information regarding the patient and the inadequate familiarity with the prescribed therapy.
The employment of electronic medical records may facilitate the quality of healthcare that is delivered to the patient because healthcare professionals have greater access in availing and understanding critical information that will guide them in the treatment course of the patient. Electronic medical records can also furnish additional support when they design and decide on the treatment regimen for the patient.
Such electronic access may also accelerate their rendition of medical knowledge to bedside practice. The introduction of electronic medical records has been very helpful in the medical field because there is currently a vast amount on information regarding the incidence and prevalence of healthcare-related infections, as well as mortality data. Evidence-based medical practice focuses on observational studies to improve methodological quality and effectiveness of intervention.
Unfortunately, these significant figures are not efficiently disseminated and more importantly, not integrated into the general protocol of healthcare, because they have not been discovered by healthcare personnel for their own perusal and for integration into their routine services. Health care informatics is a recent area that involves the integration of health science, computer science, information science and cognitive science to assist in the management of healthcare information (Saba and McCormick, 2001).
By using the electronic information offered by these different fields of science, healthcare informatics may be divided into the areas of medical informatics, health informatics, dental informatics and nursing informatics. The areas of medical, dental and nursing informatics overlap in several areas such as information retrieval, clinical care, ethics, imaging, computer security, electronic medical records and computer-assisted instruction. The use of electronic medical records has been used in the field of medicine for more than two decades and has resulted in the establishment of the specialty field of medical informatics.
Such area uses information technologies in relation to functions carried out when performing their duties (Hannah, 1985). It essentially helps in the processing of medical data, knowledge and information to aid in medical practice and delivery of health care. A parallel global scheme has existed for clinical trials, namely the Cochrane Collaboration as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) Department of Reproductive Health and Research, which aims to provide a comprehensive tabulation of available data on their specific fields of investigation.
Such reviews also aim to calculate case-fatality rates and proportion of preventable deaths by specific interventions. The development of a search and retrieval strategies using statistical information should be sensitive and specific enough because there is so much information available in the databases and internet sources that it would seem very difficult for a healthcare personnel to sieve through all the unnecessary and irrelevant entries.
Databases are technically pools of information that may be useful should the right search results be presented to the investigator, or these may be useless if the investigator ends up with more confusion than when he just started using the database. Electronic medical records that have been pooled into a central registry may serve as a convenient and systematic resource for retrieval of medical information that is very useful for critical care management in the healthcare setting. Two of the most recognized and employed database in the medical field are MEDLINE and EMBASE.
Both are universal bibliographical records of primary literature, with MEDLINE covering mostly North American publications, while EMBASE covers more European reports. Unfortunately, these two databases only have 30 to 50% overlap in their entries (Topfer, 1999). Unfortunately, databases employing evidence-based practice do not include unpublished reports, either because the investigators assumed that nobody else would be interested in looking at their data or because the investigators thought that a report that shows no significant differences is not worth publishing.
In addition, non-English reports are not included in most of the databases due to language restrictions, yet these types of reports usually show statistically significant results as well as larger treatment effects. CINAHL is another database that healthcare practitioners, especially nurses, utilize for information on patient care and delivery. It has been very useful in medical specialties including descriptive and explanatory information on nursing topics.
The employment of electronic medical records as applied to healthcare is highly interdisciplinary, with certain areas overlapping with computer science and education. Medical informatics provides a direct route to information connecting medical informatics to research, especially evidence-based practice, and this provides a quicker mode for physicians to gather information on specific patient cases. In the earlier days, a healthcare practitioner needs to read a lot of research reports, journals and books in order to be up-to-date with the latest trends in health care diagnosis, treatment and delivery.
The use of statistical knowledge and information as directly applied to evidence-based nursing provides a quicker way to access so much information that is available around the globe. It also saves times for the healthcare practitioner in researching for answers to their healthcare questions, leaving them more time to provide quality health care to their patients. In addition, the networking and establishment of databases serves as an essential tool to the construction of virtual global hospitals, wherein doors do not exist, but actually bridges are erected.
A study has reported that even electronic medical records may carry incorrect diagnoses (Wu and Straus, 2006). It has been suggested that the method of data collection and input into the medical records registry must have been done without so much caution, resulting in erroneous diagnoses. This disadvantage on the use of electronic medical records may also in the same adverse effects the traditional medical errors cause. The consequences of these incorrect electronic inputs may also result in wrong treatments assigned to a patient, resulting in prolonged hospitalizations and even death of the patient.
It is therefore important that the human connection still be used even when electronic medical records are present in the healthcare settings. In addition, the healthcare professional should know that he should not be very dependent on these electronic databases and should still keep a keen eye for any little doubtful information that they may find in these electronic medical records. It is imperative that caution be used all the time, especially when dealing with healthcare conditions.