The Exciting Future of EMR!

Integrating EMR into hospitals:


It’s interesting how doctors may resist such change due to reluctance to be transparent. This shows how EMR can also help to achieve greater transparency in the healthcare industry, as there is often asymmetric information and the patient is not in a position to decide which treatment he requires. There has been an issue of over-charging which patients are often unaware of.

Currently, in Singapore the government is attempting to produce industry standards of charges for General Practioners at least. However, such standards are probably static and even if they are updated frequently, patients may not even access them frequently.

Thus, EMR may serve as a stepping-stone towards having an integrated system storing with all medical records and biomedical technology advances. The prospects of this are exciting – a streamlined cloud computing system which doctors can access and update patients’ medical records. Such a consolidated system will also facilitate research and development in the laboratory to study how various patients react to different treatments, and any common allergies. It would also help to address the problem of asymmetrical information in the healthcare industry, solving the common principal-agent problem. EMR systems could also help to ensure safety of patients, by alerting doctors when they fail to follow the recommended guidelines for a particular drug, which can potentially cause undesired reactions in patients.

What about using EMR to create a potential testing ground for emerging biomedical technology? Patients may be able to choose from a platter of treatments- traditional or relatively new, perhaps at a lower cost. However, there are huge ethical issues as less well-off patients may choose more affordable, yet riskier technology. Moreover, such a system which allows too-new treatments to be consumed by patients may lead to an uncontrollable surge of different illnesses born from the different combinations of treatments administered, leading to a healthcare disaster. Thus, this again highlights the importance of the government in the healthcare industry for the right amount of regulation- to reach an optimal level of social welfare, balancing risks and minimizing the costs.

Here’s an example of a current EMR technology which has already been adopted by 1,500 hospitals and 10,000 extended care organizations: Allscripts Healthcare Solutions

*Economic Analysis: It is interesting to note that there are Network Effects present in the market for EMRs- The more clinics are connected, the more information will be stored in the database, hence the more benefits obtained from the information system itself.