The intelligent use and clinical benefits of electronic medical records in multiple sclerosis

Abstract

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are being quickly adopted in clinics around the world. This advancement can greatly enhance the clinical care of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) by providing formats that allow easier review of medical documents and more structured avenues to store relevant information. MS clinicians should be involved with implementing and updating EMRs at their institutions to ensure EMR formats that benefit MS clinics. EMRs also provide opportunities for research studies of MS to access detailed, longitudinal data of MS disease course that would otherwise be difficult to collect.

Keywords:

• electronic medical records
• multiple sclerosis

Financial & competing interests disclosure

Support for this study was provided through NIH Grant funding NS032830 (JL Haines, MF Davis) and GM080178 (MF Davis). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Key issues

• Electronic medical records (EMRs) are becoming standard in MS clinics. Current use varies from new implementation to over 20 years of clinical history recorded in EMR.

• EMRs are in varied formats. Multiple sclerosis (MS) clinicians and researchers need to be part of the discussion to improve EMR format for use in MS clinics.

• Electronic records should be designed to help clinicians track MS disease progress.

• EMR data can be used for research. Electronic records allow more information to be accessed in a greater number of people than could be done manually in paper medical records.

• EMRs are designed for clinical use; missing data and potentially missing data should be taken into account in research studies using EMR data.

• Genetic information is slowly being incorporated in the clinical realm; there are currently no direct MS applications for genetic information.

• DNA biorepositories linked to EMRs are likely to continue to be an important resource for MS genetic research studies.