Electronic Health Records Comprehensive Nursing Essay Example

Electronic Health Records Comprehensive Nursing Essay Example

Pros and Cons of Electronic Health Records (EHR)

With the development of information technology, most health centers have adopted Electronic Health Records instead of the usual paper chart to manage patients’ information. In this essay, the pros and cons of the EHE are discussed. The essay also delves into the implementation of EHR in a healthcare setting to facilitate faster workflow. Besides, the roles of teams responsible for EHR integration for effective outcomes are discussed.(Electronic Health Records Comprehensive Nursing Essay Example)

Pros of EHR

EHR offers instantaneous, patient-focussed records B; thus, information concerning patients is available in real-time and securely to approved medical personnel.  Besides, EHR contains patients’ medical and treatment history. However, an EHR is established to supersede the typical medical data collection to include a significantly more comprehensive view of patients’ healthcare delivery. Kruse et al. (2018) discuss the pros of the EHR system as a critical component of information technology in the health sector for various reasons. One, EHR stores information on diagnosis, medications, treatment regimen, among other medical data. Two, EHR offers access to clinical evidence that aid decision-making about patient care. Lastly, EHR facilitates the automation and organization of workflow within a healthcare facility, thus easing data entry, storage, and access.(Electronic Health Records Comprehensive Nursing Essay Example)

Cons of EHR

Transitioning from paper to EHR is often complicated and lengthy. As such, any glitch within the implementation process can lead to a devastating impact on revenue, patient confidence, or harm. Besides, EHR adoption has been associated with concerns over the privacy and confidentiality of patients’ information (Boonstra et al., 2014), which is a primary limiting factor to its implementation. Other problems associated with EHR systems include missing/incorrect data entry, lack of interoperability standards, and reduced productivity due to time-consuming data entry procedures.(Electronic Health Records Comprehensive Nursing Essay Example)

Implementation of EHR Implementation

EHR is software that enables documentation, storage, retrieval, sharing, and analysis of medical information of a patient. As such, EHR is hosted on a computer and is internet/cloud-based. Due to the evolving nature of technology, EHR systems’ implementation is an ongoing process since there is always an opportunity to optimize workflow and data analysis.(Electronic Health Records Comprehensive Nursing Essay Example)

Establishing an appropriate team is a critical step for a successful EHR implementation. Moreover, creating an EHR team goes hand in hand with setting goals to create a unified vision for the EHR implementation. EHR team members must be vibrant, positive, and forward-thinking personnel to accommodate different perspectives, skills, and knowledge. Team members can include and are not limited to nurse managers, physicians, medical, schedulers, laboratory personnel, registration, IT lead, billing staff, training, redesign, and meaningful use leads.(Electronic Health Records Comprehensive Nursing Essay Example)

Depending on the healthcare facility, the implementation team can be assigned more than one role. While the team lead is responsible for guiding every team member, the implementation manager’s role is to ensure that all EHR implementation stages are purposefully followed. These stages include planning and identifying an appropriate EHR system vendor, adopting, implementing, using, and optimizing or replacing the EHR system. Equally, other team members play significant roles in data collection, operation of the computes, analysis, and information provision that facilitates the improvement or replacement of an adopted EHR system.

Since EHR implementation is done in a multidisciplinary team, organizational culture contributes to its success and efficacy. Boonstra et al. (2014) mentioned that a good organizational culture is critical to EHR implementation due to its role in facilitating collaboration and teamwork, essential to enhancing trust and effective communications among teams. As such, critical information is communicated to team members, and relevant actions are taken. Therefore, bureaucratic organizations cannot effectively implement EHR systems since it slows the system and often leads to interdepartmental (Boonstra et al., 2014).(Electronic Health Records Comprehensive Nursing Essay Example)