Electronic medical record (EMR) is a medical record in digital format. A Medical record is a systematic documentation of a patient’s medical history and care. The term ‘Medical record’ is used both for the physical folder for each individual patient and for the body of information which comprises the total of each patient’s health history. Although medical records are traditionally compiled and stored by health care providers, personal health records maintained by individual patients have become more popular in recent years.
Published in Chapter:
Security of Electronic Medical Records
Ana Ferreira (University of Kent, UK & University of Porto, Portugal), Ricardo Cruz-Correia (CINTESIS, Portugal & University of Porto, Portugal), Luís Antunes (LIACC, University of Porto, Portugal), and David Chadwick (University of Kent, UK)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-002-8.ch003
Abstract
This chapter reports the authors’ experiences regarding security of the electronic medical record (EMR). Although the EMR objectives are to support shared care and healthcare professionals’ workflow, there are some barriers that prevent its successful use. These barriers comprise not only costs, regarding resources and time, but also patient / health professional relations, ICT (information and communication technologies) education as well as security issues. It is very difficult to evaluate EMR systems; however some studies already made show problems regarding usability and proper healthcare workflow modeling. Legislation to guide the protection of health information systems is also very difficult to implement in practice. This chapter shows that access control, as a part of an EMR, can be a key to minimize some of its barriers, if the means to design, develop and evaluate access control are closer to users’ needs and workflow complexity.