Electronic Medical Records Management and Administration: Current Trends, Issues, Solutions, and Future Directions

Electronic Medical Records Management and Administration: Current Trends, Issues, Solutions, and Future Directions

연구 분야: Networking

학회: SN Computer Science

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is often used to refer to as electronic personal health (EPH) records or electronic healthcare records (EHR). These are considered vivacious assets of health facilities and patients. The relevance of the EMRs has motivated diverse innovations in the collecting, organizing, managing and administering for purpose of treatment primarily and other reasons. There are various concerns raised about legitimate usages, reproducibility, accuracy, and privacy breaches of EMRs across majority of health and medical facilities globally. This phenomenon became popular due to its support of electronic devices, wireless links, transmission and storage of data in the cloud, and communication across a gateway (or central-point). Therefore, physicians and medical facilities were empowered to undertake virtual consultations to patients through telemedicine applications for the remote treatment and diagnosis. Internet of Things (IoT) systems, medical wearable objects, and sensors were the basic components that collect and transmit patient data on real-time basis to a base station or centralized servers managed by hospitals. However, there is the need to improve creation and adoption of EMRs not without understanding their roles and shortfalls as well possible means of improvement. Consequently, this study conducts a systematic literature review on electronic medical records management and administration under current trends, issues, solutions and future directions. To this end, eighty-one (81) peer-reviewed articles including conferences and journals papers were included in the final stage of the study after applying Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Protocols (PRIMA-P) methodology of records selection. The contributions of this study include: the recognition of the informed consent strategy as the best solution to illegitimate access to patient electronic records; the use of permissioned access strategies provided by blockchain technology as most recent attempt for privacy preservations; the use of lightweight cryptosystems with greater emphasis on Lattice systems; and the need to scale beyond theoretical frameworks to real-life implementations.