The Certification Commission CCHIT is a recognized certification body for electronic health records and their networks. It is private but nonprofit initiative.
Our mission is to accelerate the adoption of health information technology by creating an efficient, credible and sustainable certification program
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An electronic Medical record (EMR) refers to an individual patient’s medical record in digital format. This type of medical record keeping is probably what we will have in 10 to 20 years in time, when we won’t be using paper any more probably for green reason, and also as part of moving on with latest technology.
Advantages of using EMR are many. These include easy data entry, easy data maintenance, easy data retrivability, Long term storage, and preventing duplication of records. They are also extremely useful in Clinical audits and research. There are some disadvantages especially with old data which is in paper it would be very difficult to get these into electronic format. Duplication of records especially if patient gets admitted to different departments or different hospitals, especially when they different kinds of EMR. Here comes use of standardisation of EMR soft ware. Security of EMR is problem, especially online ones because the data can be prey to hackers. Cost of initial setting up may be higher in certain context, especially in radiology applications.
In our hospital we found PACS system was very useful radiology applications. Initial installation of this programme was expensive because we have to change most of hardware. But when we audited we found we are actually spending less not having to print the films and not having to repeat the lost films. We also have different software MEDETEC for regular data entry, it is unix based and very cumbersome to use. you need little time to get used to the software. Once you get used to using MEDETEC I found extremely useful in adding and retriving data. Overall I felt they were very useful but need little more standardised.
