Issues and Solutions in Electronic Health Record Systems

SYSTEM SCIENCE IN HEALTHCARE
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Discussion
i. Over confidence in Electronic Health Care systems
Most hospitals and offices of physicians have fully adopted Electronic Health Record (EHR)
systems, a trend that is steadily growing, and the traditional paper-based record keeping systems
have been taken over. Adoption of these systems has redefined the roles of various stakeholders
in the health care industry and in some cases invited new stakeholders into the medical scene.
For example, software designers in this tech-savvy age are key stakeholders in the health care
industry. In fact, technology is as a key driver of the health care services, and with some areas of
health care service delivery automated, the health sector would be greatly imprecated without
technology. However, managing patients only through the lens of health care smart systems has
been the cause of the most grievous mistakes that have been recorded in the medical industry5.
When not rightly used, health care decision support systems could be the source of problems in
the medical industry.
When practitioners put all their confidence to decision support systems, they forget that the
systems are programed rather than trained, and so they are always liable to make errors.
Furthermore, decision support systems in the health care setting could be taking away the
professionalism from the medical industry, leading to a dry and unbecoming system that is
abhorred by patients. For one reason, medical practitioners who are charged with taking care of
patients have been forced to use these systems without a proper knowledge on their usage1.
Hence, it is thus that in the given case study, Dr. Stanley made a grievous error in diagnosis of
Zoya, which transcended to a wrong drug prescription.
For some practitioners, Electronic Medical Records have become the equivalent of drive-texting
in the medical profession, as they spend a lot of time behind computer screens at the expense of
attending to the patient personally. In so saying, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) tend to pull
away health care professionals from patients, and the desired personal interaction with the
patients is replaced with a thousand clicks of the mouse2. Every health care practitioner well
knows that giving the patients an attentive ear is the foundation of proper diagnosis and
treatment. Heath practitioners have spent years and years learning to parse the clues they get

from patients, only for Electronic Medical Records to suck the professionalism out of them.
Overdependence and overconfidence in Electronic Medical Records is the issue here which
needs to be addressed1.
To remedy this situation, clinicians and hospital administration should work harmoniously to
demand ameliorated products from software designers and implore the government to formulate
tolerable laws to govern the use of Electronic Medical Records. Social Network Analyses of
complex system3.
ii. Lack of Integration of Health care Decision Support Systems
It is agreeable to everybody that proper health care of patients fundamentally relies on proper
coordination between clinicians and the administration of the hospital. This coordination is also
necessary for the effective working of electronic medical system in information retrieval and
giving of diagnosis reports. Lack of an integrated Electronic Medical Record system to
harmonize patient information from various hospitals is a serious shortcoming. Many errors that
have been made by practitioners in the medical field could have been avoided had the Electronic
Medical Record systems been standardized in Australia. Since one EHR system cannot
communicate with another, serious errors are made that would otherwise have been prevented
with the integration of all Health Electronic Records (HER) systems in the country5. A key
benefit of integrating HER systems would be improvisation of the quality of communication
with other health care providers which will lead to enhancement of prescription refilling
capacities and improvement of online interfaces to more pharmacists. In so doing, errors in the
system would be easily noticed, and failure in one system will be easily captured in another
system. The interdependence that will be created in due process will do away with all system
redundancies and promote effective patient report processing. Furthermore, decision support
would be enhanced with more participants giving additional recommendations for analysis of the
patient condition at hand. This will enhance a greater participation of more health care
participants into the EHRs interoperable systems as opposed to the standalone EMRs6.
iii. Health Care Systems are not Resilient
Resilience in health care systems is at the foundation of the full recovery of the health systems’
capacity to absorb shocks of mis-handlings and negligence’s in the medical practice. Health care