Arwa Alolaqi
Research Fellow, Imperial College London
Title: Effect of electronic medical records on doctor-patient’s relationship in Gulf countries: A systematic review
Biography
Dr.Arwa Alolaqi, Specialist in Community Medicine at Hamad Medical Corporation. Working as Tobaccco Tratment Specialista at WHO Tobacco Control Centre at stat of Qatar. She is know doing two years fellowship at imperial collage WHO public health centr . She is the lead of medical training and cerner system at her organization.
Abstract
Background The electronic medical record (EMR) is a tool that most of the health systems implemented national and international to improve health and healthcare delivery. However, EMR has been implemented gradually among hospitals in the Arabian Gulf countries. Up to this point no systematic review has been conducted to identify the impact of this technology on doctor-patient’s relationship. Objective To understand the impact of the EMR use on patient–doctor relationships and communication in the Arabian Gulf countries. Design Systematic review of English language publications, the search strategy using date starting from October 2005 up to October 2017, using Ovid MEDLINE and Google scholar. Data sources Bibliographic searches of medical databases, specialist medical informatics databases, conference proceedings, and institutional contacts. Study selection Studies selected according to a predefined framework for categorizing review papers. Data extraction Reference standards and measurements used to judge quality. Results Bibliographic searches identified 380 publications. From these, 291 studies were screened after de-duplication. 45 studies were excluded (references without abstract or not related to health). A detailed analysis of the remaining 44 studies was performed and excluded the studies (not related to electronic health records). The remaining 17 studies were enrolled in the systematic review. There were many positive impacts of the EMR reported within the gulf countries studies. These were improvement in the quality specially the performance of physicians along with the improved accuracy in monitoring the health status of the patients. However, one of the negative impact that been reported was the shifting of doctor’s attention from the patients towards the typing tasks which are required in entering the details of the patients along with their medication at the time of the consultation. Conclusion It has been concluded that the implementation of the EMR proves beneficial in the attainment of effective care delivery outcomes by the doctors in Gulf countries. The use of EMR entails the doctors in recording the details of the patients with respect to the medication and the treatment procedures as well as their outcomes. Thus, the use of EMR promotes and enhances the delivery of healthcare outcomes in the Gulf countries. Thus, it is highly recommended to implement EMR across health systems within the Gulf countries. Further studies need to be conducted among other healthcare practitioners to examine the impact of EMR on system efficiency and how this will influence adoption rates by all users, particularly physicians.