There are many reasons why the healthcare industry and patients will benefit by adopting universal electronic medical records (EMRs), but the reduction of our nation’s healthcare costs is perhaps one of the greatest potential advantages to digital recordkeeping. In fact, the Institute of Medicine has estimated that medical errors alone account for nearly $37 billion annually in preventable costs, largely due to duplicate testing and a general lack of communication between facilities.

The Obama administration has officially stated that EMRs can work to mitigate errors by allowing doctors to more efficiently coordinate care and to share information with one another accurately and instantly. Despite this – and despite the extraordinary success of EMRs that are already being used in respected, groundbreaking facilities like The Mayo Clinic – most healthcare facilities in this country have still not been equipped to share information, or to record and store data, electronically.

In addition, some experts estimate that doctors and nurses spend 40 percent of their time simply documenting patient data – essentially administrative work – that could be done much more efficiently using a centralized EMR software system. By replacing outdated data-entry tasks with new information technology solutions, medical facilities can empower employees by focusing on efficiency, thereby increasing profitability and the quality of care patients receive.

In fact, patient care is directly affected in a variety of ways by the adoption of EMRs. For example, the total number of records that are available when cross-referencing data directly affects the accuracy and implications of the information that is aggregated. In this way, anonymous but universal EMR sharing can create a data pool from which physicians and other healthcare practitioners pull and cross-reference information – including disease histories, incidents of drug interactions, and drug side effects – to name only a few.

The long-term positive effects that EMRs would have on healthcare costs, including research and development – not to mention patient care – are difficult to fathom, simply because many physicians have not yet experienced the ready access to comprehensive data that the universal adoption of EMR software provides.