Electronic Health Record System Analysis

electronic health record (EHR) A secure real-time, point-of-care, patient centric information resource for clinicians allowing access to patient information when and where needed and incorporating evidence-based decision support.

The electronic health record (EHR) is a digital record of a patient’s health history that may be made up of records from many locations and/or sources, such as hospitals, providers, clinics, and public health agencies. The EHR is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and has built-in safeguards to assure patient health information confidentiality and security. (Huston, 2013)

Electronic health records (EHR) are health records that are generated by health care professionals when a patient is seen at a medical facility such as a hospital, mental health clinic, or pharmacy. The EHR contains the same information as paper based medical records like demographics, medical complaints and prescriptions. There are so many more benefits to the EHR than paper based medical records. Accuracy of diagnosis, quality and convenience of patient care, and patient participation are a few examples of the

But with the benefits there are also the risk factors. Some disadvantages of the EHR system would include; initial cost of planning and implementing an EHR system, lack of standardization across the healthcare setting, unauthorized access to patient information (security and privacy), inaccurate patient information if not updated properly, technical downtimes, potential negligence for data loss and possible patient access to conditions that they don’t comprehend which may panic them.

EHRs reduce your paperwork – It reduces the paperwork I have to fill in each time I go into the doctors office. If I am referred to a specialists or another area within the network they already have all of my complete information.

EHR was created to have a technical way to securely exchange private and personal medical health information in hopes to improve the quality of care, decrease medical errors, limiting paper use, reduction of health care cost, and increasing a person access to affordable health care. A mandate was created for EHR stating that health records can be accessible to all facilities with patients having the capability to access their own health records at any time. Ameliorating the quality and convenience of care given to a patient, allow for cost saving measures, engage the patient and family to participate in their care, improve accuracy of medical diagnosis, and enhance the efficiency of the overall outcome of the patients’ health.

An electronic health record (EHR) defines as the permissible patient record created in hospitals that serve as the data source for all health records. It is an electronic version of a paper chart that includes the patient’s medical history, maintained by the provider over time, and may include all of the key administrative clinical data relevant to that persons care. Information that is readily available includes information such as demographics, progress notes, allergies, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory data, & radiology reports. The intent of an EHR can be understood as a complete record of patient

EHR is an electronic version of a patient’s chart that can be distributed among all the healthcare providers, agencies, and many facilities. As one of the articles states “the benefits of an electronic health record include a gain in healthcare efficiencies, large gains in quality and safety, and lower healthcare costs for consumers.” Individuals in EHR practices provides better quality care and outcomes, improves patient safety, and anybody benefits from it “regardless of their insurance status, whether privately insured, uninsured, or covered by Medicare or Medicaid.” As you mentioning great aspect of controlling costs is documentation of patient care. The care coordinator who deals mostly with insurances at the facility I work at, she relies

EHR is a digital collection of health records from a single patient. It records and maintains updated information in a timely fashion. This information is then easily passed, and shared to various healthcare entities. Where it is easily accessible from remote sites to many people at the same time. Electronic Health Records (EHR) include: data on a patient’s medical history, allergies, medication, demographics, laboratory test results, and personal

Change itself is never easy and sometimes the road of working out the kinks in a system can be quite frustrating. However, once implemented, the work load is lightened, and the time has come to reap the many benefits of EHR 's. Once implemented EHR 's will make every staff member 's job easier and here are some of the many ways it does just that! First, EHR 's reduce paperwork and eliminate both confusion and errors caused by the infamous “physicians ' handwriting”. This in turn results in less human errors and less duplication of effort. With EHR 'S we are no longer chasing charts, or even worse, loosing them all together. Just think of all the space that is saved by no longer having to store paper charts. With the implementation of EHR 's every healthcare member including all staff, physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies can share in enhanced information which results in much improved patient care, and an improvement in overall management of a practice. Everyone wins! With EHR 's data regarding reports from labs, radiology, tests, and procedures can be shared with all involved resulting in better outcomes in patient care. For the medical biller and coder, EHR 's allow a much quicker ability to electronically file a claim instead of handwriting it out on a paper claim. With EHR 's we have more accurate claims with less rejections resulting in speedy claims. A medical office specialist no longer has to take time

Another beneficial feature of EHR systems is that they allow different authorized professionals to access your information from anywhere at any point in time. If a patient checks into the Emergency Room, is moved to Radiology for imaging, then moved to Orthopedics for surgery and finally placed in a bed for recovery, each individual throughout that process will have access to that patient’s medical records without having to communicate with each department. This fosters an

Legacy electronic health record (EHR) software was engineered to facilitate building comprehensive patient records, primarily collecting clinical data. Electronic patient files compiled during the 1960's, 70's and 80's were definitely more complete, accurate and legible, but not necessarily easier to share. In the early 1990's as the size and price of computer equipment plummeted, more practice managers embraced the EHR concept and adoption rates soared. Today, the majority of physicians use some form of digital patient record management system, but not everyone is happy with their of EHR software performance. Which leads to the topic of this post: Is your EHR software holding your practice back?

One pro of the EHR is that it makes accessing patient information faster since you can easily bring it up on a computer as opposed to going through physical copies. This allows patients to be dealt with properly according to their records.  While the EHR has many benefits,  the one pitfall is that since all this data is made so accessible,  patient information is vulnerable to attack by hackers and those who misuse their authorized access to such information. This puts patients at risk of this information were to be exposed. This is a considerable risk when patients' lives are at stake. EHRs can improve patient health literacy by making information readily assessable to patients to help them make well informed health care decisions. It also empowered patients to take control in managing some clinical conditions that requires skills needed to take care of themselves (Watson,

There are many positive impacts one of them being patient empowerment. This gives the patient “the ability to track provider payments and could add their own notations” (Gonzales, J) to the electronic health records. Patients get to keep track of the records themselves; this also lets them make sure everything is correct on their records. This is also good because if the doctors accidentally note something incorrectly that can cause major problems when in major emergencies. This empowers the patient to be able to control and correct the doctor on the problem. Negative impact health care providers are “faced with loss of productivity” (Unintentional Consequences of EHR Solutions) our health care providers are rushed to enter information into the computer just to get actual time to see the patient. This is leaving doctors in a position where they have to be constantly on their computer than getting actual time with the patient. This puts us in a situation when the doctor is having to do so much work on a computer it makes us question whether we are getting the care we are paying for from our health care providers. Because the doctors are in a position where they want to be productive they are “directly inputting patient data into EHR (electronic health record) systems in a rushed environment” (Unintentional Consequences of EHR Solutions) causing inaccurate data such as, medicine dosages, drug names,

The strengths of EHR is that all information of the patient’s medical history is kept electronically instead of paper. This can help save trees and have all information kept in virtual folders under the patient names. Doctors can easily read everything about a patient with just a click of a button or a tap on a screen. This means that doctors can work in a faster speed and not have to ask “why are you here today” when it is obviously on the screen. Instead, the doctors could go straight to asking, “what are you feeling and where is the pain?” Since doctors have sloppy hand writing, EHR can stop the misdiagnoses and cutting off patient’s limbs.