Version 1
: Received: 20 May 2020 / Approved: 22 May 2020 / Online: 22 May 2020 (10:48:18 CEST)
How to cite:
Lorkowski, J.; Jugowicz, A. The Historical Determinations of Creating Health Records – A New Approach In Terms Of The Ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic. Preprints2020, 2020050352. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0352.v1
Lorkowski, J.; Jugowicz, A. The Historical Determinations of Creating Health Records – A New Approach In Terms Of The Ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic. Preprints 2020, 2020050352. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0352.v1
Lorkowski, J.; Jugowicz, A. The Historical Determinations of Creating Health Records – A New Approach In Terms Of The Ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic. Preprints2020, 2020050352. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0352.v1
APA Style
Lorkowski, J., & Jugowicz, A. (2020). <strong>The Historical Determinations of Creating Health Records – A New Approach In Terms Of The Ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic</strong>. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0352.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Lorkowski, J. and Agnieszka Jugowicz. 2020 "<strong>The Historical Determinations of Creating Health Records – A New Approach In Terms Of The Ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic</strong>" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0352.v1
Abstract
The history of health records (later also called medical records), including ones regarding individual patients, is thousands of years old. It finds it roots in the first ancient civilisations. Up until the 19th century the records’ purpose was mainly an educational one. In the 19th and 20th century they started becoming significant in other roles as well, including those not strictly limited to medicine. In particular, to account for medical procedures, insurance proceeds or legal action. Currently we are living in a revolutionary era when it comes to health records, in which their character has changed from a “paper-based” to an electronic one. This paper presents the development of health records from the ancient to modern times, mainly in Europe and North America. Other cultures and civilisations, including China and India, are not discussed. An analysis of available sources was conducted, inter alia digital versions of manuscripts up to hundreds of years old. The analysis was based on PubMed and Google Scholar (several key words, all the available sources). Sources published in non-international languages (e.g. Dutch) were also investigated. Overall, approximately 600 articles were analysed, 158 of which were used and cited in this paper. The conclusions drawn from the analysis are as follows: (1) Health records, priorly used mostly for educational purposes, for about 100 years now have acquired a fully formal status. (2) We are currently facing the most revolutionary changes regarding the transformation of paper-based records into electronic ones. (3) The consequences of this process include systematic applications of solutions within the area of e-health, which allow us to make medical services more flexible, improve the health of individual patients and entire populations and potentially limit expenditure. (4) In the light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, introducing electronic health records could be beneficial in terms of limiting the potential sources of contamination (physical copies of health records), saving time and resources, and improving the network of communication between medical centres.
Keywords
Health record; electronic health record; e-health record; the history of medicine; the economy of the healthcare system
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Virology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
