Urology EHR: A Patient’s Contribution to Their Community

In providing the most comprehensive and quality patient care, keeping up with technology is as important as keeping up with the trends in medicine.  Urology EHRs (electronic health records) build a complete patient profile from the urological exams and combine it with the existing data entered by all the patient’s primary care provider and specialty physicians, which can then be used to accurately measure community health statistics.     

Urology EHRs come with ready to use exam and procedure templates that apply exclusively to the specialty.  The templates for procedures and exams are easily adjustable and customizable to fit the variations among patient and doctor’s needs.  EHRs improve the quality of data collected through their compatibility with urology medical devices.  Results from prostate ultrasounds, urinalysis machines and bladder volume scanners can be directly uploaded from the device, eliminating the need to enter values manually, creating the potential for human error. 

The integrated clinical decision support feature of the EHR helps urologists better utilize the data collected from the medical devices and effectively apply it, turning symptoms into a solution.   Combining data, diagnoses and treatment decisions contribute the missing pieces to the human body puzzle to paint a complete picture of the patient’s overall health and wellbeing.

Slices of the population demographic can be examined from the clinical patient data provided by the EHR and compared with the data from other local area hospitals and physicians.   By comparing and combining data gathered, the community or region can report and track trends in urological conditions like prostate cancer and urinary tract infections (UTIs), as well as report any communicable infection outbreaks to the CDC.  Determining the prevalence and path of a condition makes way for new designs in treatment methodology and approach, the most recent example being UCSF’s emergency room check-in and screening kiosk for UTIs that aim to expedite patient care.