Barriers to implement Electronic Health Records (EHRs)

INTRODUCTION: During the past 20 years, with huge advances in information technology and particularly in the areas of health, various forms of electronic records have been studied, analyzed, designed or implemented. An Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is defined as digitally stored healthcare information throughout an individual’s lifetime with the purpose of supporting continuity of care, education, and research. The EHRs may include such things as observations, laboratory tests, medical images, treatments, therapies; drugs administered, patient identifying information, legal permissions, and so on. Despite of the potential benefits of electronic health records, implement of this project facing with barriers and restriction ,that the most of these limitations are cost constraints, technical limitations, standardization limits, attitudinal constraints–behavior of individuals and organizational constraints. AIM: The aim of this study was to express the main barriers to implement EHRs. METHODS: This study was unsystematic-review study. The literature was searched on main barriers to implement EHRs with the help of library, books, conference proceedings, data bank, and also searches engines available at Google, Google scholar. For our searches, we employed the following keywords and their combinations: Electronic health record, implement, obstacle, and information technology in the searching areas of title, keywords, abstract, and full text. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: In this study, more than 43 articles and reports were collected and 32 of them were selected based on their relevancy. Many studies indicate that the most important factor than other limitations to implement the EHR are resistance to change.