[MBA] Are Electronic Medical Records a Cure for Health Care?

Identify and describe the problem in this case.
The case is about current high cost of health care industry in US. There were not technology used in medical record keeping. But now some emerging software and applications are being used. The cost of traditional record keeping is higher compared to the facility it provides. The efficiency of traditional system is low. It also highlights the cost patients, hospital and government paying for not following efficient technology. It sheds light on some Electronic Medical Record systems viz. Veterans Affairs, VistaA. The emerging EMR tries to solve the case to some extent but there have been issues with insurance company and the technical manpower needed for its implementation. More than 50% US hospitals are failing to meet federal requirements. EMR is less efficient for small institutions having high cost per doctor rate. There are many issues with while sharing medical data between different system and hospitals due to lack of Software Standards for medical information keeping.

 

What management, organization, and technology factors are responsible for the difficulties in building electronic medical record systems? Explain your answer.
Not only in medical record keeping system there arises issues while switching from one technology to another or adapting to any technology. We know human nature is "resistant to changes”. The management should change the way they are following the record keeping, the check and balance system. Going for the organizational difficulties the cost of operation will rise to some extent. Many organizations do not have infrastructure needing for this. It will be costly for small organizations to follow it. Organizations need some control mechanism to regulate the work flow. New technologies needs 20 hours of training for doctors and counting 20 hours of thousands doctor it will be a high loss as the time of doctor are quite precious. Technological difficulties arise the availability of reliable internet connection, the ability of cross platform support of any software applications. There should be some International Standard/Format for keeping and sharing information. Also comes the issue on privacy of data and confidential information kept. On a long run as people, hospital staff and stakeholders along with the government authorities become familiar and used to on the technology it will be a new era in medical record keeping, everyone will accept the trend. EMR will become vital for all hospitals.

What is the business, political and social impact of not digitizing medical records for individual physicians, hospitals, insurers, patients, and the US government?
Currently almost all sector use digitized mechanism to keep information viz. national security agency, insurance companies and many more. As the time goes on hospital sectors also cannot lag on the technology run. It should some how take a race and pace of development. The business impact includes the portability of document. Patient and doctors have to carry all paper report along with them, it cost high on duplicating a record. The cost of recording is higher. The security is low, higher changes of wear and tear of data occur. On a long duration the quality of information kept not digitized degrades and later on becomes useless. When most of the people be in queue or are suffered from less efficient way of run they are less happy with government, their representatives or their way of thinking is reduced to many extent. The administrative costs and medical recordkeeping is nearly 13% of U.S. health care expense. The physician will waste their time searching or indexing records. The insurance company will need more time. It will be hard time of hospitals to collect compensation from insurer. The way of information keeping will have higher risk and errors if is not digitized. Data loss and misplacement be a major issue. When there is not standard on record keeping government will suffer from regulating the standards.

What are the business and social benefits of digitizing medical record keeping?
The adaptation to technology have very benefits to organization, patient and service providers to. Management will have nice time and relax as the flow of business and control mechanism is good. Management have to allocate less budget of data security and data keeping. The effectiveness of records kept is higher on using digitized technologies. Since more tasks are automated upon digitization less manpower are needed or staff engages on skilled task rather than doing layman work or indexing and searching. People gets immediate recommendation, error free service and payment becomes easier. The capacity of hospitals for placing patient will be high as patient are mobile due to faster service. Patients get quality service, reduction in duplication of diagnosis. The government need less budgets on healthcare so other sector of nation development will speed up and later on the quality of life is also improved.

Are electronic medical record systems a good solution to the problem of rising health care cost in the US? Explain your answer.
Yes it is. Since an electronic medical record system should contain record of many medical data per person, including personal information, their medical history, the result from various diagnosis and treatments, prescription medications the progress of medication it becomes inevitable to adapt some facilitating technology for medical record keeping. The cost spent on record keeping is high so some integrated system capable of doing many tasks at once, adapting to many system software are need. The EMR reduces error and duplication so that cost is also reduced. Doctors can concern on their specific task rather than search and index the documents. Problems were the uniformity on record kept that cause high time investment and high cost too. So implementation of EMR is a good solution to the problem of rising health care cost in US.