Health Care Informatics Sample Paper

The Advantages and Drawbacks of Electronic Health Record (EHR)

Electronic health record (EHR) aids caregivers to provide patients with better care by offering accurate, complete, and up-to-date patient information (Shickel et al., 2017). It enables quick access to patient data, thereby creating an avenue for more efficient care. By providing accurate and specific information about an individual, it minimizes the chances for errors that might arise due to mix-up in patient records.

This ensures the safety of patients and invites a more positive outcome. Among the advantages of EHR include providing a platform that makes it easy for caregivers and clinicians to pull up patient records instantly. Further, it allows secure transfer of patient data from one clinician to the other, thereby reducing medical errors, providing safer care, and allowing providers to issue correct diagnosis.

By allowing the storage of patient records electronically, EHR influences the outcome of a diagnosis as well as the prescription. However, there are some limitations to its usage. Some of these limitations include confidentiality and security concerns, financial issues, workflow changes, and loss of jobs due to its adoption. When a facility decides to adopt EHR, it is likely to encounter some implementation costs. Physicians will have to be taught how to feed paper charts electronically. Procuring the requisite hardware and software will require some significant investment. Additionally, there are maintenance costs involved now and again.

Adoption of EHR as A DNP-Prepared Nurse

As a leader in a healthcare facility that has switched to the use of EHR, there are changes that one has to anticipate. For instance, I will have to train my healthcare team on how to use EHR effectively. A magnet-care hospital varies from a rural regional clinic in many ways. For instance, a magnet-care facility involves the systematic implementation of checklists, clinical guidelines, financial incentives, disciplinary measures, and electronic health records.

All of these things require greater managerial oversight, unlike in the case of a facility that uses a rural regional clinic management system. Further, a magnet-care hospital in a busy metropolitan area is likely to have continuous workflow, and that means EHR will aid greatly in reducing the workload due to its efficiency. EHR will also assist in accurate record storage of the numerous patients, which will eventually lead to correct diagnosis and prescription, and hence patient safety.

Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS)

Ten years ago, computerized physician order entry (CPOE) was not a popular thing in the healthcare sector. However, the HITECH Act aided its rapid entry into the health realm (Korb-Savoldelli et al., 2018). Often, computerized physician order entry is paired with clinical decision support systems (CDSS) to offer better care by preventing incorrect order entry and medical errors. In the USA, wrong prescription, and administration of medication account for a considerable proportion of errors in the health sector, hence the need for pragmatic intervention.

Embedding CDSS and CPOE into EHR aids in eliminating adverse drug events (ADEs), thereby improving medical outcomes (Gold et al., 2017). With CPOE, a licensed individual can enter orders directly into the EHR system, which results in minimized errors and eliminates ambiguous orders.

Some of these errors occur due to wrong abbreviation use and illegible handwriting. CDSS work in the same way. To enhance the effectiveness of CDSS, I would avoid over-reliance on the systems since it could lead to the elimination of important staff in a facility. Considering the case of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), the major problem relates to the fact they often have several co-morbidities that necessitates the use of about five medications consisting of around ten or more doses. CPOE and CDSS technologies would aid in providing the right and timely prescriptions in this area.

References

Gold, R., Cottrell, E., Bunce, A., Middendorf, M., Hollombe, C., Cowburn, S., & Melgar, G. (2017). Developing electronic health record (EHR) strategies related to health center patients’ social determinants of health. The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, 30(4), 428-447. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3122/jabfm.2017.04.170046
Korb-Savoldelli, V., Boussadi, A., Durieux, P., & Sabatier, B. (2018). Prevalence of computerized physician order entry systems–related medication prescription errors: A systematic review. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 111, 112-122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2017.12.022
Shickel, B., Tighe, P. J., Bihorac, A., & Rashidi, P. (2017). Deep EHR: a survey of recent advances in deep learning techniques for electronic health record (EHR) analysis. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 22(5), 1589-1604. DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2017.2767063