Cost/Benefit Analysis of Electronic Health Records

Information Technology is proving to be a vital element in the administration of healthcare industry, providing a new way to store vast amounts of information without requiring huge physical storage space. Electronic health records (eHR) system is a comprehensive database system used to store and access patient’s healthcare information. Performance improvement throughout the industry remains a primary focus, as efforts to improve the quality of care and improve organisation performance. Soon, “no longer paper-based records systems will fulfill the needs of clinicians and related healthcare workers” (Koeller, 2002), as the industry advances. Information Technology will continue to be an instrument of change in the industry, as benefits of using electronic health records is being achieved. In contrast, several barriers, obstacles and disadvantages will be observed as a cost to implement such technology. In this essay, three related cases studies will be discuss to demonstrate the cos/benefit analysis of electronic health records. Thus, to determine this, determinants of cos/benefit analysis are defined beforehand as a general overview.