Electronic Medical Records or EMR have the potential to create a revolution in the provision of healthcare services. Electronic medical records ensure that patient’s detailed medical information is stored in a database which can be accessed by a whole network of authorized healthcare services providers. Data stored in an electronic form is less likely to get lost or misinterpreted. Right now we frequently come to know about cases in which a patient has to get expensive tests redone because he/she has lost the reports of the same tests. Such incidents cause a lot of unnecessary expenses and wastage of resources.

Even more concerning is incidents where pharmacists provide wrong medication because the handwritten prescription provided is not legible. Wrong medication can lead to serious drug reactions and worse, death. Electronic medical records have the potential to eliminate such mistakes and what’s more they can make the whole system of healthcare much more efficient and effective at every level. However before we can exploit the full benefits of EMR we need to ensure that they are implemented on a large, national scale. But there are some factors which are proving to be roadblocks on the way, one of the major problems being interoperability of EMR’s.

Electronic medical records require special software and hardware to run. Now in order to achieve full benefits, these records need to be accessed from a variety of terminals. This ability of various software and hardware to share data without any problem is referred to as inoperability. In the case of medical data, they are stored using different coding systems at different places which create problems in sharing them across different platforms. Fortunately, the US government has been proactive in this area and has been taking measures that would ensure improvement in interoperability of EMR’s. The government realizes that widespread use of EMRs can lead to great improvements in the quality of healthcare, as well as patient safety which is a very important development as it can lead to the optimal implementation of EMR’s.

There are many companies which have been engaged in developing EMR systems. GHT is counted among the top ones because of the high quality of its work and specializes in creating custom software for the field of healthcare and has extensive exposure and experience in this field.