Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” As the medical world evolves, we need to make sure we are evolving with it while making sure we are trusting God every step of the way.

Below is the student post that needs to be replied to: Make sure the sources are no older than 5 years.

Gladys Attin (student name)

There were many good points as far as the pros and cons of having computers in the medical field discussed in all your discussions. The medical field is an area which evolves on a daily base and new things are always being presented. With this rapid evolution in the healthcare field there is a great need for all medical offices to keep electronic medical records of each patient. Like anything in this world, it has its pros and cons. One important advantage as an office manager keeping records electronically is that it helps facilitate the records to other medical institutions within minutes when needed in an emergency via network, email or fax. For healthcare providers such as nurses, doctors, or physician assistants it allows them to see the patient’s full records, symptoms, diagnoses, treatment plans, medications, allergies, or order medications for the patient and so much more within seconds. It prevents them from having to dig through tons of papers or call other physicians (O’Reilly, 2018). The Practice Management Programs (PMP) are a big advantage for the physicians, because it allows them to transmit claims electronically and get paid faster than when performing the same tasks on paper. Even though it has made life a lot easier for any kind of health provider it can have its downside as well. For instance, some of its disadvantages to electronic medical records are that they are only as accurate as the person imputing them or the software/network working properly. When the network is down it makes it impossible to retrieve any kind of record on the patients. All medical records are imputed into a specific software/IT system created by man, which means at times it could malfunction and do more harm than good (O’Reilly, 2018). Start- up cost can be high, and as many of you mentioned they can be hacked however the pros still outweigh the cons and in the long run it becomes more cost efficient for the medical offices.

Prior to computers all health care providers kept an extensive hand-written paper trail for each patient that could take hours to go through. It would also require for them to have large file cabinets taking up room in their facilities. To get paid they would have to mail out the claims and wait for the insurance company to mail back the payment verses paying right away electronically (Sanderson, 2016). In addition, getting medical files back and forth between medical offices took extra-long.

Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” As the medical world evolves, we need to make sure we are evolving with it while making sure we are trusting God every step of the way.

Sanderson, S. (2016). Computers in the Medical Office. 9th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

O’Reilly K. (2018). Ways EHRs can lead to unintended safety problems. American Medical News.

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