An Investigation of Electronic Health Records

Healthcare is an information intensive industry, yet Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have been unable to infiltrate this sector successfully. With the growing trend towards a virtual health record, the healthcare sector is now trying to implement the electronic health record, which would contain all health and healthcare information relating to each patient. The aim of this paper is to investigate the concept of electronic health records, and identify the issues that make electronic health record implementation infeasible. This paper highlights the main difficulties with paper-based patient records, and shows how electronic health records overcome these limitations. Also, the main issues, benefits and barriers are also discussed in order to give a full view of what the electronic health record actually is.