What is a database? (Why do I need an EHR?)

Posted on | April 12, 2010 | No Comments

I ran across an old college research paper while I was reorganizing this weekend. While looking through the bibliography in the back I remembered all the hours I spent at the card catalog, on microfiche viewers and a service called Gopher, one of the first internet services. I loved gopher at the time. The old method of writing down a page of potential resources, walking through the library to gather them, and then sitting down for an hour to determine which books might be a benefit to me was simplified into a 30 second computer search. With a few key terms I could generate a well defined list about my specific topic and read the abstract for each resource before ever looking at the book.

Gopher was able to keep track of information about every book in the entire Oregon College/University system and put it at my fingertips. Using gopher to search through the librariesdatabase made my life a lot easier.

Today you interface with databases everyday. If you log into a website, use your ATM card or navigate a telephone menu you are working with a database. A database is a set of structured data that is presented to an end user by a server. The server is like a very, very fast and efficient librarian. Think of me doing my entire research at the library in the blink of an eye and that would be me without any coffee.

Sharing data using servers and databases is very easy too. By knowing how to ask the server a question you can find anything in your database lightning fast. The is where your electronic health record software comes in.

Every person you see has a completely different story. Information such as first and last names, insurance companies and e-mail address are straight forward and easy to define. When classifying information such as cause of injury on a certain date of service or treatments performed during a patient encounter the software company has to be more creative with how they will store that data.

The goal of an electronic health record developer is to make it simple and intuitive to put information about your patients in the database as well as recall and present the information. Currently there are over 300 EHRs on the market all of which use a database to help you simplify your practice and make your transition to a paperless office possible.

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