CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY

       Background

The infusion of modern information technology into the medical records keeping has made electronic healthcare (i.e. eHealth) gained much prominence in the healthcare sector across the globe. This owing to the concerted effort at national, regional, and international levels to make the management of patients’ health information more enhanced, efficient, and effective for quality medication.

Generically, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines eHealth in its broad scope as the cost-effective and secure adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to assist health and health-related fields, comprising healthcare services, and health surveillance, education, knowledge, literature, and research (WHO, 2019). In a narrowly construed manner, it is described as the healthcare practice assisted by electronic processes (Talking Medicines, 2017) or the use of ICTs for healthcare practice (WHO, 2019). It therefore comprises technology such as patient administration systems, lab systems, and electronic health records (Talking Medicines, 2017).

Since the introduction of the electronic health records (EHR) in the health sector, there has been a great total transformation of paper-based health record keeping and transmittal systems to an electronic system (Routine Health Information Network [RHINO], 2019). Before the introduction of eHealth, patients’ health records were kept manually in large volumes of printed folders, which demanded appropriate records management practices in order to ease storage and retrieval of records. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid (2012) defines EHR as “an electronic version of a patient’s medical history that is maintained by the provider over time, and may include all of the key administrative clinical data, relevant to that person’s care under

a particular provider, including demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory data and radiology reports”. That is, the invention of EHR systems were designed as a clinical and administrative tool to stock and retrieve patients’ medical history. Today, EHR system is one of the eHealth techniques to effectively handle patients’ health information and records.

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