Hospital Leaders Target Electronic Medical Record Implementation

The modern electronic medical record (EMR) was born in August 1996 with the advent of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that covered the privacy portion of the medical record, guarding health files from interlopers and ensuring that a patient’s health issues were only discussed or shared under specified guidelines.

HIPAA continued in April 2005 with the implementation of the standards that dealt with electronic security and maintenance of health information. Lessons learned from the hurricanes of fall 2005 were that paper medical records are easily lost or destroyed, and if electronically kept, data needs to reside on computers far away from disaster areas, preferably in multiple backups.

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