How Using EMR Can Help the Family Doctor

Featuring Dr. Daniel Ngui, BSc (P.T), MD, CFPC, FCFP, Family Physician

Duration: 2 minutes, 40 seconds

For physicians who are uncertain about the adoption of an EMR into their office, I would say that it’d be important to consider that the EMR is an essential tool to help physicians practice the best organized medicine, evidence-based medicine, and medicine that helps us to feel satisfied about our interactions with our patients.

Electronic medical record is not just a filing cabinet that’s a fancy one, that’s electronic. In fact, what it is it helps us to have lots of features that make it easier to practice. In terms of accessibility, our charts are legible, our chart notes our partners can read.

In terms of seeing patients, we can instantly call up patients if we have a question or a concern. We can review our laboratory results, our investigations with a click of a mouse, and I think that makes it a wonderful working situation.

From the point of view of chronic disease management, an electronic medical record is so important to help analyze your patient data. One can ask questions about identifying key patients who we need to spend more time with. We can identify patients who are not quite in target. We call them in and do more work with them to improve their outcomes and their health in general.

One final practice management tips that is important for electronic medical record users is that having an electronic medical record enables physician to attract other physicians who are new and who want to join a technologically advanced office that has an organized system.

When a physician is close to retirement, it is far easier to transition all the patients’ charts to a new physician. It saves us in terms of storage of all the former paper charts down into a hard drive.

Having an electronic record is essential because it makes our job more efficient. By generating prescriptions to generating referral letters with a click of a mouse, this allows us to spend more one-on-one time with the patient rather than focusing on the tasks at hand.

Overall, electronic medical records are a great way of improving healthcare provided by the family doctor, by the specialist to patients, and manage our patient populations in a thorough and efficient manner.

Presenter: Dr. Daniel Ngui, Family Doctor, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Family Doctor