While important, these are not sufficient to ensure effective chronic illness care. According to chronic care models, special information-based tasks and processes are needed, including facilitating population-based care, tracking measures of health over time (such as depression scores), involving the care team, including the patient, and giving feedback about progress. Most systems fall short of providing the necessary support. “ (Dorr, D. 2007, March …show more content…
It is much easier to retrieve and track patient data using an EHR and patient registries than to use labor-intensive paper chart reviews. EHRs are much better organized than paper charts, allowing for faster retrieval of lab or x-ray results. It is also likely that an EHR will have an electronic problem summary list that outlines a patient’s major illnesses, surgeries, allergies and medications. How many times does a physician open a large paper chart, only to have loose lab results fall out? How many times does a physician re-order a test because the results or the chart is missing? It is important to note that paper charts are missing as much as 25% of the time, according to one study.10 Even if the chart is available; specifics are missing in 13.6% of patient encounters, according to another study.” (Hoyt, R. 2015, September 17). Health informatics plays a professional role in my department of radiology by being able to access patient charts for history purposes, allows us to look at results almost immediately after the Radiologist is done reading the exams and allows us to keep track of exams we may have already performed on the patient before. In the past we had to use paper documentation for results and often times