An electronic medical record (EMR) is a digital version of a paper chart that contains all of a patient’s medical history from one practice. An EMR is mostly used by providers for diagnosis and treatment that means a complete paperless solution with patient information at your fingertips.
An EMR is more beneficial than paper records for both providers as well as patients because it allows:
Improved health care quality and convenience for providers by quick access to track the patient records from inpatient and remote locations for more coordinated and efficient care saving time and effort. Additionally, eliminates need for most transcription activity and dramatically reduces the need for paper storage facilities.
Helps identify patients who are due for preventive visits and screenings with quality decision support, clinical alerts, reminders, and medical information. The information stored in EMR eliminates illegible handwriting, reduces data entry errors, and is complete, which facilitates accurate coding and billing, and is not easily shared with the providers outside of a practice.
To monitor how patients measure up to certain parameters, such as vaccinations and blood pressure readings. It is safer and more reliable for prescribing improving overall quality of care in a practice.

Role-based security allows only authorized individuals access to medical records. Access logging and auditing provides a history of who accessed and who modified any record.
Improved quality health care and is made convenient for patients by reducing the need to fill out the same forms at each encounter with reliable point-of-care information and reminders notifying the providers of important health interventions.
Ease of sending e-prescriptions electronically to the pharmacy and electronic referrals with easier access for follow-up care with the specialists. Patient portal provides the patients 24-hour access to their personal health information through Internet with a secure username and password.

• Top

Patient Portal benefits patient care and provider workflow when combined with its integrated electronic health record (EHR) system. This strategy improves the quality of care and facilitates coordination of care across its multiple clinic locations. The portal is just a secure e-mail system that we can be used for two-way communication empowering the patient and the provider to interact and manage care efficiently. Patients can access their portal with a secured username and password through a web connection.

Patients can log into the system to check appointment schedules, check lab results, request a prescription refill, and complete a new patient intake form. The patient can send a message which goes right into his chart, so that the provider has all the information at hand when he reads and can respond. The portal will only be used to respond to the patient’s message and to share important health information such as the clinical summaries.

Depending on the workflow in the clinic and providers’ availability to respond in a timely manner, each clinic set up systems for routing and responding to messages. For instance, a Family practice messages generally go right to the provider, whereas for the specialists, who tend to be out of the office more often, messages go to the nurses or other staff for triage. To facilitate communication a template for common messages, such as delivery of lab results are used. Messaging is monitored periodically to ensure that communication with patients is succinct and user-friendly. The attending doctor can easily communicate with patients’ other attending physicians without the potential delay of traditional mail or phone messages.

Patients can use the secure messaging appropriately, asking clear and pointed questions. It takes providers’ less time to respond to e-mails than to process incoming calls and route them with efficient communication by reducing “phone tag” that often results in delays and miscommunication. Messages are in patients’ own words and not subject to others interpretation. Patients have the ability to directly communicate with the providers and ask questions in-between visits and convenience of requesting referrals online. Physicians can use the clinical summary either by printing it out to give to patients at the end of an encounter or making it available on the portal.

Patient Portal benefits include patients’ ability to access their clinical summaries online and also helps in patient registration for the portal. With the Patient Portal implementation, call volume and work load will be reduced and the response for Web encounters would be much better compared to telephone encounters.

Finally, Patient Portal system is a system which enhances the ability to evaluate patient effectively and patients can access their health records from their living rooms—even send and receive e‐mails from their doctor if they have any questions.

• Top