Benefits for patients
If Howard and other EMD pioneers get their way, everyone will have an electronic medical record from birth to death, stored in a secure location in full compliance with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Patients will have access to their medical records and thus control over their own health. Through the patient portal, users will be able to see records of illnesses, treatments and immunizations, make appointments with doctors and read doctors’ reports and comments in real time. Physicians and patients will have the knowledge and ability to combat physician error and reduce repeat tests, which are a waste of time and money for both parties.

Visits to the doctor will run more smoothly and provide more information, and doctors will no longer have to worry that the patient will forget to tell them that he or she went to the emergency room or saw a specialist – all this information will go into the patient’s electronic medical record, and the doctor will always have a complete picture of the person’s health in front of him or her.

Benefits for Medical Professionals
Switching to EMDs certainly sounds like a fairy tale to doctors whose offices are cluttered with medical records, but such significant changes are usually accompanied by equally significant costs. Under the “stimulus law,” physicians who decide to digitize their medical records and have a significant number of Medicare or Medicaid insurance patients are eligible for reimbursement (under the “Health Information Technology for Economic Activities and Clinical Practice Act”) from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the range of $44,000 to $64,000, which will cover the cost of switching to EMD and staff training.

New York City paramedic Dennis Tarrant often visits patients at home, and every time he has an iPad with him to fill out medical records and take notes. As an EMD user, he’s entitled to $64,000 in reimbursement from the Center for Medicaid Services.

But on top of all that, the digital doctor’s office also operates in a more relaxed mode. According to Lynn McCallum, a physician in Reading, California, not only has the technology not made her relationship with patients worse, it has made the practice more efficient.

Use of the site, including registration, training and application installation, is free for both doctors and patients. The site’s owners make money by placing pharmaceutical company ads on their pages, but patients don’t see those ads. Some may argue that it is unethical to advertise drugs on such a site, but the audience of these ads is a group of certified doctors, and such advertising can be perceived as a means of education, not sales. In addition, this method is less intrusive and less costly than the one currently used when a pharmaceutical company sends medical representatives to doctors at lunchtime to get the word out about new drugs.

Public health benefits
Switching to EMDs simplifies physician practice and makes treatment more transparent to the patient, but beyond that has promising public health benefits. Already, quite a bit of useful data comes from the 22 million records on PracticeFusion (don’t worry, the data is impersonal!), and it provides a clear picture of trends in medicine.

In particular, an analysis of PracticeFusion data showed that availability of produce from farms and fruit consumption was associated with lower body mass index. Data were collected on the most common conditions in primary care, the most popular medications, and observed side effects of various medications.

The more records that come into the system, the more opportunities there are for identifying medical trends and useful information. The EMD, for example, can greatly assist the U.S. Centers for Disease Control by recording disease outbreaks as well as the ages and locations of those affected. Information from the cloud can be used to analyze and quickly determine the health status of populations and target regions for a number of symptoms or diseases. Moreover, these digital records can mitigate the course and impact of pandemics such as the H1N1 flu.