Introduction
Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems represent a complete, real
paper chart, providing all the benefits of information that is
instantly and securely available to authorized users – at access
points all over the health facility, in different and remote care
providers’ locations, and sometimes outside the health organization,
such as the patient’s home. Ideally, an EHR will contain and share
information from all patient-care providers that might impact a
patient’s care. This enables a distributed view of a patient’s care
over time, with the end goal of providing the best quality of care for
the patient by ensuring appropriate and accurate patient data at all
the points in the record from the time of the patient’s care, past,
present and future. EHRs can provide the patient’s medical history and
diagnoses, medications and treatment plans, immunization dates,
allergies, radiology images, laboratory test results, and more.
Customization is one of the most important non-functional requirements
that must be taken into account in
healthcare software product development. Generic EHR systems offer huge benefits since they have been widely
used in many different environments and, as such, most problems have
been identified and addressed (or workarounds are common practice).
However, they might not fit some specialties and healthcare
organizations. Workflows and practices are different between
organizations, sometimes even departments within them. Customization
to the organization’s specific workflows, practices, and regulatory
requirements can improve the facility's efficiency in terms of the
number of patient visits, error reduction, and patient outcomes, among
others. Customization might be the key to making EHR systems work
seamlessly as part of an integrated technological infrastructure
within hospitals if integrated with other technologies.
The advantages of having a custom EHR system are too many to count:
better patient care, faster workflow, improved data security and
regulatory compliance, easy Single Sign-On, etc. Custom EHR can reduce
the time clinicians spend on administrative work, which, in turn, can
improve patient care as they have more time to spend with patients.
For clinicians who spend most of their energy on paperwork and data
entry, custom EHR can create a hospital environment where physicians
have more time to spend with their patients. Custom EHR also helps
generate tailored reports to aid in making both clinical and business
decisions. With custom EHR, organizations and physicians can also use
the system to improve care coordination and collaboration among people
working on a patient’s medical condition or holding responsibilities
in that patient’s care.