I think most of the healthcare settings (both private and public) in Myanmar adopt parallel settings using both paper-based and electronic-based registration. One of the feasibility assessments also said that the overall readiness for the adoption of EMR in tertiary hospitals, in Myanmar was 54.2% (Oo, H. M., Htun, Y. M., Win, T. T., Han, Z. M., Zaw, T., & Tun, K. M. (2021)).

In my experience of using both ways in health service data management, the first advantage of using EMR is the provision of efficient workflow between in/out departments and facilities without taking time for data retrieving. This can also reduce the workload and time of the staff by avoiding paper-based records and doing the data entry. In using EMR, data interoperability, and standardization can also be improved, which will have a lot of impact on the patient’s data accessibility and quality among the different facilities. Moreover, using EMR can reduce the time and distance of accessing data by the service providers, which will be important for rapid decisions and better health care.

In my opinion, rather than the bad of using EMR, difficulties in deploying EMR will be more outweighed. The first one is the needs of the infrastructures where financial, electricity, and technology will be included. Developing EMR is costly and difficult to adopt in no or poor internet coverage and shortage of power supply areas. Even if it was started for better care it may put more burden on the providers if we cannot fully adopt and sustain it. Another one is related to human resources, the staff’s willingness and ICT knowledge/training will be important for the EMR implementation, and the previous paper also supported it. The people’s concerns about using EMR when they are settled with the old practices of using paper-based, worry that they didn’t receive enough technical support, may take more time, and can have an impact on the service providers-patient relationship are also considerable in implementation of EMR.