Proposal of a Standardized Electronic Health Record for Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Electronic Health Records are electronic versions of patients’ healthcare records. An electronic health record gathers, creates and stores the health record electronically. The electronic health record has been slow to be adopted by healthcare providers. The proposed electronic health record will improve clinical documentation, quality, healthcare utilization tracking, billing and coding and make health records portable. The core components of an electronic health record include administrative functions, computerized physician order entry, lab systems, radiology systems, pharmacy systems and clinical documentation. The proposed electronic copy of the patient's health record includes all of data and important information of the patient and the patients' history and the history of the family in cooperation with the doctor. Examples of the information available in the proposed electronic health record: Patient personal information, medications, laboratory tests results, X-rays, vital symptoms and other results. It is a website that aims to serve the health community through a standardized electronic health records for all hospitals and clinics in the Saudi Arabia Kingdom. A doctor can, through this electronic records, input and read a health record and know about health history of the patient. Consequently, it will be easy for a doctor to diagnose and treat a patient in a correct way. The proposed system is reduced medical errors through exchanging experiences among doctors and knowing drugs that conflicted with similar previous health conditions. The experimental results conclude that the working environment would be improved the performance of health professionals, reduce operation/administrative costs and enhance patient safety.