Step towards paper free hospital through electronic health record

Abstract

Information technology has great potential for transforming the health care system, improving quality of care. With the increasing expansion of health information systems, the Electronic Health Record (EHR) has become one of the finest sources for clinical information aggregators in the context of digital health. The EHR is a core part of a hospital information system, as well as a service on duty of the patient to improve the treatment of patients. It can be considered as a longitudinal electronic record of patient heath information, for example vital signs, medical history or laboratory data, generated by one or more encounters in any care delivery setting. As the EHR offers many potential opportunities for healthcare systems, it is important to take steps to improve the system. With this in mind, a study of the features present on a Portuguese EHR was made. The basis of this study was an adoption model that evaluates the EHR system accordingly to its current features. After this study, the EHR will be ranked into one of the existing eight stages. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.