When a Patient A arrives unconscious, unless a family member or friend is present, we have no idea what their co-morbidities are, what medications they're on, what their allergies are. All of which are vital to provide optimal care.
I'm quite shocked because even here in backwards Stoke On Trent we have a system called CIS/Dashboard which shows all of the above information and then from there I can access online records such as ICM Results, Medisec, IPM, Medical Oncology, Cyberren, iCris, Syngo PACS, EDMS (Electronic Records Document System) and many more so these systems are already in place. Also be aware that not anybody can access the above systems unless they have been given permissions and for example out of 33 people in the department I'm the only person with access to all those systems.
I deal with Medical Records every day and all online records would be a million times better than the hand held patients records that accompany the patient and get easily lost. There is also the timeline problems that I encounter, for instance a current patient I'm working on has 4 sets of hospital notes that reach a height of 14". Because of how hospital staff are rushed it is very common for the latest patients journey to end up in all four volumes - a chart here, an A&E card there, a Nursing Book elsewhere and so on.
Some may ask why patients hand held records go missing - human error mostly.
Staff members track the wrong volume so for example volume 2 could have been tracked as volume 1 for months even though it says volume 1. After 3 years I've actually become quite expert at using our Filefast system to track down where errors were made but it's very time consuming. This story ended up in our local newspaper -
http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Pati...g-University/story-19986169-detail/story.html
So tin foil hatters, it is my vast experience that putting all your records online would be of 100% benefit to you and I already know how locked down the access is to it.
I'm not even going to mention the difficulties of reading hand held records.