Some of the benefits of this health resource

Running head: HEALTH CARE
Health care
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1HEALTH CARE
Introduction:
Health informatics is the utilization of information technology to organize and evaluate
health records in order to enhance patient care outcomes. The advent and high adaptation of
health informatics in different fields has resolved many work related burden for health workers
and lead to dramatic cost savings by reducing errors, increasing communication and driving
efficiency in care quality. There are various types of health informatics resources and this report
mainly aims to analyse the application of electronic health record in Ireland. The paper will
discuss about the significance of the resources and its link with the overall eHealth strategy in
Ireland. The paper will also examine data protection considerations and impacts of policies on
the application of EHR in hospital setting.
Details about the resource and rational for choosing it:
With the adaption of EHR in a health care setting, many problems in care delivery
process has been addressed. This is said because EHR is a real time patient-centred health record
that provide access to information in a secured manner and gives health care professionals access
to all those information which are needed to make proper care decisions and streamline
workflow. Some of the benefits of this health resource is that it has resulted in practice
efficiencies, care coordination, enhance patient care and participation and improvement in
diagnostic outcomes of patient (healthit.gov, 2017). The main rational for choosing this health
informatics resource for critique is that this technology has been implemented to improve health
surveillance and decision making process. However, as research has revealed mixed results
regarding the potential of EHR in advancing quality of care, evaluating the strength and
weakness of the resource now and in the future is important (Zhou et al., 2009; Yanamadala et

2HEALTH CARE
al., 2016). The critique of EHR will help to understand the type of preparations needed by a
health care organization to effectively utilize this technology and understand how the health care
system of Ireland is prepared to properly embrace this technology for improvement in health
service. Another rationale for choosing this technology for critique is that the ehealth strategy of
Ireland has proposed using the potential of ehealth as a driver for economic growth. Hence, it
would be interest to evaluate how EHR fulfils the eHealth strategy of Ireland (Department of
Health, 2013).
Significance of the resource:
There is various significance of EHR in the health care system. The resource has directly
or indirectly improved patient safety outcomes. A qualitative exploratory study by Tubaishat
(2019) revealed about several benefits of EHR in patient safety by reducing medication error
rates, improving data documentation process, promoting completeness of data and enhancing the
sustainability of data too. EHR has been widely recognized to have positive effect on patient care
as it has give primary care providers to get information in formats that were not possible with
paper charts. Some of the useful features of EHR are that it provide treatment goals, enhance
access to information and laboratory data. With such feature, it has become possible to improve
the quality standards and avoid the duplication of costs. The EHR data not only informs practice,
but it also gives health professional numerous opportunities to curb medical errors and avoid
unnecessary health care costs too (Manca, 2015).
However, despite such benefits of the EHR in enhancing patient safety and data storage
problems, looking at some of the challenges or weakness of EHR are important too. For
example, nursing staffs who used EHRs have expressed concern regarding the elements in the