TPO 46

The reading and listening section discuss saving medical data in electronic-based rather than the paper base. Although the listening section brings three theories about the positive effects of electronic database, the speaker refutes these ideas for several reasons, which I will describe in this report.

First, the passage points out that by saving patient's information on electronic formats, doctors can save money on storing and transferring medical records. The lecturer, in contrast, rejects this by claiming that doctors had to save paper base data for emergency come back and for saving patient's information. In this situation, doctors not only must pay a cost for storing electronic data but also must pay for saving paper base data.+

Furthermore, the passage which states that by electronic medical recording, the possibility of errors that happened base on the illegible handwriting will be eliminated. However, the professor argues that doctors do not have enough time and patient to input medical information to the computers. They write the medical information of their patients on papers and then their office staffs upload the data to the electronic records. Therefore, bad and illegible handwritings could still cause errors even in electronic-based records.

Finally, although the passage says that electronic records make a valuable data bank for researchers and can help them, the speaker disagrees by mentioning that it does not necessarily help researchers because using the patient records is subjected to privacy laws. Subsequently, the researchers who want to use this information should follow a restricted procedure and get a lot of permissions, so it is not granted that electronic records aid researchers.