EMR: Benefits And Issues

The electronic medical record system (EMR) serves many purposes in an emergency for the patient, physicians, and hospitals involved in the diagnosis and care during an emergency.

Electronic filing also cuts down on the space needed tremendously, they no longer need a huge room to store all patients files. It is also faster to find, update, and send electronic files. Last but not least, societal outcomes include being better able to conduct research and achieving improved population health. Although it seems there could be nothing wrong with EMR, there are potential disadvantages associated with this technology. These include financial issues, changes in workflow, temporary loss of productivity associated with EHR adoption, privacy and security concerns, as well as access.

An eMAR implementation is important for Meaningful use. Will you be working with an EHR system that is cloud based? Hunter (2011) explains that patient safety at the point of medication administration is significantly increased with the use of eMARs. The warnings, alerts, and parameter checks that are in place will facilitate a safer medication administration. Nurses will be reminded to check heart rate, lab results, and pain scales, ultimately helping the nurse to administer medications in a safer manner. The use of an eMAR will also improve medication administration by keeping an accurate schedule for administration by flagging medication that is due as well as prevent medications from being administered to patients that have allergies

EMR concerns are plaguing the health care industry today that requires change. Healthcare professionals, such as nurses, are on the front lines in the defense against medical errors. Closing the gap between current clinical and hospital practices and the various approaches to improving patient safety requires changes that are cultural and systemic in nature. The greatest challenge to hospitals using an EMR system is the expense of the new system, and the challenge nurses face with technology adoption in usage of EMR and protection of records. Even though spending depends on both the hospital size and the technologies were chosen, implementation and installation of a Health Information Technology system, which includes EMR, are often multi-year investments. The transition from a paper-based system to an electronic system is a very complicated process within every hospital establishment. The transformation is time-consuming and involves numerous staff from across the hospital, including Information Technology personnel, physicians, nurses, ancillary providers, etc. Although hospitals work hard at managing the changes required to move toward an electronic environment, there is no guarantee that hospital personnel will properly utilize the expensive new IT system or EMR. Therefore, the training in the EMR integration is required to all medical staff to have an efficient and uncomplicated system.

Electronic Health Records (EHR), is a similar system but does more than an EMR in the sense of collecting clinical data, but is designed to reach out to other healthcare providers that originally collected and compiled the patient’s health information. EHRS can share information with other providers such as laboratories, specialists, and other physicians which help to prevent medical errors and better serve the patient since all clinicians involved information is available through the EHR. (Lighter, Donald E (2011). According to The National Alliance for Health Information Technology, EHR data “can be created, managed, and consulted by authorized clinicians and

Electronic medical records (EMR) can improve healthcare performance and cost efficiency in healthcare facilities. Improving healthcare performance includes patient safety, quality of care, and health status of the patients. Patient safety with medication errors continue to escalate, costing health care systems billions of dollars each year (Seibert, et al., 2014). An estimated 450,000 adverse drug events-medication errors that result in patient harm-occur annually, approximately 25% of which are preventable (Seibert, et. al, 2014). Overall, having an EMR helps improve healthcare delivery: no illegible handwriting, information can be shared on an instantaneous basis within a healthcare institution or between institutions, and review of previous

Electronic medical records can benefit patients in many ways. One major way it can benefit a patient is the efficiency of the records being organized and easy for any practitioner or staff member to read. EMR can lower the risks of

The U.S. healthcare system is disintegrated and highly expensive. Healthcare policy makers are thus making tremendous efforts to implement healthcare payment reforms. One of such reform undertaking focuses majorly on how the providers and hospitals are paid. Most of the providers use to operate in a “Fee-for-Service” (FFS) environment, which means they are paid for performing a specific service such as an operation, a procedure or a consultation. The main issue with FFS is it assumes that providing a service is analogous with the patient achieving a certain, positive outcome (such as remission from a disease). Alternately, if a patient is asked what he/she would like to “purchase” from the provider, they would probably reply to purchase “an

Besides the disadvantages of (EMR)’s the advantages pose great benefits to patient care and efficiency. The greater use of electronic medical records or health records can reduce wait times, of seeing doctors or waiting for test results. All staff would need to cohesively work out the technical challenges and software data. With sophisticated IT

Electronic health record and electronic medical record (EMR) are often used interchangeably within the health care industry, but they actually mean different things in the regulatory arena. An EHR refers to an aggregate of a patient’s EMR data that is generated over time by various institutions and can be shared among them. An institution can use EHR technology only if it has an EMR system that is capable of interoperating with other EMR systems.

The Electronic Medical Record, or "EMR," is a digital version of the paper charts in a hospital or physician's clinic. The Electronic Medical Record is capable of storing all of the patient's medical history, both past and present. Prior to the creation and implementation of the EMR, all physicians were on paper records. EMR's are far superior to paper records in many ways, most notable the ability to comprehensive data collection, ease of access and transferability, and transparency.

EMR implementation functioned as a means to reduce healthcare costs and improve patient care. “A systematic review of electronic records in hospital settings showed evidence of cost reduction for a little improvement in treatment quality; Consumers with serious chronic diseases, disabilities, and multiple healthcare problems may experience direct benefits from PHRs”

The EMR system is better for some doctors because it eliminates the unclear handwriting, thus cutting down on the unclear writing mistakes by doctors. The patients have been released from the hospital at a rate of at least one day earlier than the patients with paper records and these bills were almost $900.00 less than when they used the paper records. There have been many deaths each year because of the wrong medication being written on the prescription paperwork and a pharmacist misread the handwriting on the form. If this information is typed the chances of making a mistake are less. There are also EMR systems that diagnose diseases and treatments, which is another advantage. Just imagine how fast the patient can be healed if a computer program can predict the results of an illness by entering the symptoms such as a device that searches for glaucoma via computer generated images, the analyzing of mammograms and the ultrasound device to analyze lumps in a females breast that determine if it is benign or cancerous. Most of the time these computer systems have accuracy rate of 80% or more which is the last advantages that we will talk about today.

For as long as any of us can really remember, paper based medical records have been the way to go. Sadly if changes had to be made to the files then the files would need to be physically taken out of storage and then returned after. More times than not patients will have more than one health care provider and in this case, the patient files are not necessarily being successfully shared among them due to the fact that the files are tangible. Fortunately the implementation of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system is the answer to increasing efficiency and reducing the need for storage. The EMR allows the medical records to be retrieved and accessed by any of the health care professionals that need the information to help a patient. Implementing an EMR would have improved diagnosis and treatments, significantly reduce errors found within personal health records, and improve the speed of care and decision making responses from assigned medical professionals. As with everything there are always cons as well as the pros. The unfortunate cons of an EMR are the technological side. It may be difficult to teach all of the people who will be using it how to use the EMR and more importantly getting a majority of people on board with it. After weighing out the pros and cons, there are series of steps that are conducted through stages otherwise known as phases. EMR implementation require making sure that the organization is ready for the commitment, making an outline, creating a system

A move to establish Electrical Medical Records in a health facility is a positive step to the establishment of an efficient institution that will catch up with the ever changing technological world. It is of great significance for health institution to embrace new technologies like the EMR for them to be in a position to offer quality services as well as improving their productivity and the general output. When an institution is implementing a change, the process will be monitored gradually so that it becomes well accepted by the entire employees and be integrated smoothly into the running of the health facility. Depending on the acceptability of the change, the implementation will fail or run smoothly and without taking long the organization will be fully operational with EMR systems. Upon adoption of EMR, a positive impact will be realized within the organization and the crucial health records will be accessed within the shortest time possible, hence the organization will offer better and faster services with reduced occurrence of errors and delayed provision of services. There will also be an effective relationship between the organization's related processes, systems, and personal or professional roles. In any case any issue will arise an effective communication technique will be used to deal with the issue.