The most important reason for a practice to adopt electronic health records is that it will speed up diagnoses and make effective treatments available at an earlier stage, according to experts.

Laura Landry, the interim CEO of Cal eConnect, California's health information exchange network, told California Healthline the pressing need for data exchange became clear to her while she experienced vision problems one weekend.

The doctor she saw ordered a battery of tests to determine the cause of the vision loss. However, most of these tests had already been conducted by other doctors, Landry said. The duplicative testing took 12 hours. When the testing was completed, the doctors said they did not have enough time in the day to proceed with the best course of treatment and that it would have to wait.

This anecdote underscores how giving doctors access to greater amounts of patient data can make it easier for them to administer appropriate treatments at an earlier stage.

"How can we improve healthcare? We could make data necessary," Landry told the news source.

HIMSS states that many doctors report accomplishing certain tasks in less time when they are using an EHR system.