Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) represent a crucial component of many healthcare institutions today, offering inestimable value in the way of improved care and better communication among healthcare providers. The adoption of electronic records systems has been found to reduce the incidence of medication errors, strengthen care coordination among healthcare personnel and multidisciplinary teams, and improve clinical decision making. Through EHRs, physicians and healthcare professions may consult in real-time via online networking, thereby expediting care and ultimately saving lives, as in the case of Baby Malea, (The Day Telehealth Saved Baby Malea, n.d.). Indeed, an increasing number of healthcare professionals today view EHRs as absolutely

The functionality, layout, extent of accessibility of information, and ease of use all affect an EMR’s efficacy and are determining factors in whether patient care outcomes are successful or fall short of achieving goals for care. To illustrate this point, when I worked in a trauma 1 center in North Orange County, the hospital used something of a fusion of paper and electronic medical records. Orders, medication prescriptions, and even progress notes were frequently found in paper form in the charts of patients. This made “competing for charts” something of a given, with doctors, specialty consultants, nurses, and nursing students all vying for patients’ charts. It likewise increased the risk of errors being made due to illegible penmanship and the challenge of deciphering orders. Therefore, while I loved working at that particular hospital (given the variety of patients treated and the remarkable skills of physicians, surgeons, nurses and technologists who worked there), the high dependency on paper charting ultimately influenced my decision to work at a different

The layout of the EMR allows for easy perusal of all information stored in a patient’s chart, making accessing specific data and charting in the system fairly easy. Among my least favorite EMRs is ProTouch, mostly on account of the fact that the interface does not provide ready access to all aspects of a patient’s medical record, making accessing information laborious and time-consuming. Additionally, unlike Epic’s ability to import data (for example, VS and glucometer results), everything must be entered manually with ProTouch. This can result in frustration when much of a healthcare professional’s time is spent meaninglessly duplicating tasks that could be automated. It results in decreased time at the patient’s bedside attending to the actual needs of the patient given the healthcare worker’s obligation to enter rote data into the antiquated computer