The following excerpt is from an article found on Nurse.com. When it comes to treating patients with acute myocardial infarction, electronic health records have had a positive impact, despite a few minor drawbacks in implementing the technology, according to a recent report.

The following excerpt is from an article found on Modern Medicine. It was written by Lynda Charters. If you are considering buying a new electronic health record (EHR) system or updating your current one, make sure you spend enough time in the preparatory stage of system selection and vendor selection, says one expert.

Some medical administrators approach EHR implementation the same way one would approach leasing a new car. You do some research online, read a few reviews, compare features and price points. In lieu of the test drive, you request a demo. You may have to demo several systems before you "fall in love with one." But, when you do, you negotiate contract terms, select key customization components and arrange financing. Then, all that's left to do is simply plug in the hardware and software and step into the new world of digital patient files and cloud-based scheduling. Sounds easy. Right?

There is a wide gap between the amount of data being collected by electronic health record (EHR) technology and the number of physicians who access and exploit the data. One problem may be that accessing unstructured data, for example, clinical notes or patient records, is not as easy as accessing structured data.

Several years ago the key theme in conversations among medical organization executives was how much to invest in health information technology. Today, healthcare leaders are asking why the investment failed to transform their practice into a lean, efficient, patient-centric ecosystem. Aligning analytics strategy with healthcare organizations is instrumental to answering that question.

The information that your staff obtains, generates and stores about patients is of enormous importance on an individual basis, with medical professionals also taking into account the medical histories of family members when making their diagnosis. But the information you gather on every patient through your electronic health record software is also important in the aggregate. The more data in your system, the more valuable information you can mine from the database. And as you amass information on all of your patients, you are venturing into “Big Data” territory.

For more than two millennia, doctors have striven to uphold that physicians’ oath. While it is almost inconceivable that physicians practicing their art twenty-five hundred years ago could have foreseen the transformative effects that modern technology would have on healthcare delivery, this ancient document addressed the need to view treatment through a patient-centered lens. While the earliest writings have been modified and translated innumerable times, the excerpt below from a modern version demonstrates the original diktat to treat the patient and not the condition.

In a perfect world, your medical practice would routinely submit claims after seeing patients and then receive payment in a timely fashion, with nary a hiccup affecting your cash flow and bottom line. You would spend more time focusing on delivering high quality medical care and less time worrying about the financial aspects of the practice. Most managers of medical practices are aware of the need to automate processes as much as possible, and to that end, they will gladly implement electronic health record and practice management software for improved efficiency.

If your orthopedics practice has been getting by with generic software to manage operations or if you are still forcing the staff to contend with an old-fashioned, paper-based method to run the office, you should know that electronic health record software is now available to support your specialty.

A pediatrics practice has its own set of unique challenges that other specialties will not be so concerned with. This fact supports the notion that a pediatrics practice will benefit by using software designed with its unique patient demographics in mind, rather than trying to get by with more general software to manage things. If you are new to the idea of using specialized medical software to manage patients’ electronic health records, here are six characteristics your pediatric EHR software should have.