Electronic medical records (EMRs) have become an essential part of today’s patient care. If you look back around two decades ago there was no sign of such sophisticated systems. But by 1992, the hardware and software to run these EMRs had become affordable and in reach of individual and companies. In the early 2000s the EMRs were usually used at reception desks to make appointments and track patient flow. But it was the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare which made using EMRs compulsory in US hospitals but in rest of the world it was still a different story. For example, National Health Service (NHS) in UK had been using EMRs for quite sometime partly because they are a single-payer country where the health is nationalized like most of other socialist countries in Europe.
The global healthcare software development market has been expected to grow to more than $17 billion by 2023 with an annual growth of around 5.7%. As this growth is increasing so are the number of software houses going around the world into EMR business. Now we even have specialized software for every specialty like dermatology, plastic surgery and others to cater to specialty-specific patient data.
There are many benefits of using EMR in medical practices. EMRs increase physician productivity, level of patient care, patient satisfaction, patient safety, revenue management, practice audit and they can also be used to conduct clinical research in any healthcare establishment. As the technology advanced new features were introduced, for example the advent of e-prescriptions, laboratories and imaging centers going digital we relied less on physical medical investigations since now everything could be done in the “cloud”.
Opting for using EMRs is very fruitful for most healthcare establishments since the get a better deal in couple hundred bucks. Many medical clinics or hospitals opt for ready-made EMRs but some also rely on custom-built solutions, especially in eastern countries where the currency, patient demographics, revenue collection methods and mode of practice can vary a lot from their western counterparts. In such a situation, most of the healthcare establishments rely on local healthcare software development companies that they can find in their country for better understanding their requirements and delivering the best software in the shortest possible time-frame.
