Long waiting time is what upsets patients most. It wouldn’t be wrong if patient’s anxiety is directly related to the waiting time. Therefore, quick access to medical services is most appreciated and spending valuable time in front of the doctor’s office makes patients nervous and practitioners ineffective.

How can we optimise? 

The digitalization of modern society has taken in storm every area of human life and activity, including medicine. It saves time – the most costly commodity in the busy world we live in.

Modern medical practices are piled up with financial, administrative and medical paper work. Being integrated units for medical service, they have to keep and handle all kind of record, which is a demanding task.  Applying electronic medical records, which is an up-to-date resource, really spares time for both patients and medics.

What is an EMR?

It is a digital chart, stored in the computer and containing all the patient personal information like contact details, ID card and insurance number, medical history, diagnoses, medications, immunization dates, and allergies.

Reducing Patient Wait Time

A substantial part of practitioner’s work is to gather and keep information about his patients’ health status. Just imagine all patients’ data is kept in long paper sheets stored in files, as done some years ago. This consumes an enormous amount of time, requires stuff to process them and the records can be easily misplaced or lost. The easy access to the records to extract valuable information for patients’ health history is the milestone for adequate and timely diagnostics. Hence the practitioners will spare substantial part of the waiting time of the patients.

Quick Access to Patient Records

The modern practices must be operable and efficient and provide quick and timely service. Being overloaded with patients, the medical staff needs to avoid the paperwork as much as possible to increase the number of the examined patients and to reduce their waiting time.

Practitioners need to focus on the patient and their health issues in its entirety, rather than filling in papers, form, searching for information concerning previous visits, diagnoses, lab results, allergies or other prescribed medication. All this can be done in a minute by accessing the patient medical record, which facilitates the diagnostic capacity of the medical practices.

Scheduled follow-ups

By the means of electronic medical records the practices can acquire information in an instant, without leaving the desk to search for medical data. This not only saves patient’s time, but is crucial in medical emergency situations. Quick exchange of information with other practices or messaging the patients for their scheduled checks and follow up visits is yet another advantage of the electronic records with regard to time saving. No need to spend time on phone call or manually handled spreadsheets. Managing and optimizing schedules can be easily achieved by using electronic files and eliminates the possibility of duplications and long queues in front of the cabinets. This increases the number of visits and substantially reduces patients’ waiting time. The national vaccination programs, for instance, are a subject of strict monitoring and keeping electronic records is the best manner to follow up dates and time frames.

Conclusion

The improvement of medical care system has been made possible through the astounding benefits of the electronic medical record application. Better organization – less waiting time for patients and sparing it for the practitioners to handle and fight medical issues.