Nursing Experiences with EHR: Impact, Ethical Issues, and Recommendations

Informatics is an interdisciplinary field that drives the innovation in the approach of
information and knowledge management (Hebda, Hunter, Czar, 2018). The following
discussion is focussed on the topic nursing experiences with EHR. Along with the expansion
of the use of Electronic Health Record (EHR), the health informatics has grown as an
involving science. Therefore, the topic is relevant as well as important in healthcare
informatics. Technology is a pervasive part of every aspect and in order to improve the
population health outcome and healthcare cost, HITECH Act strongly recommended using
health information technology in the healthcare services (Hebda, Hunter, Czar, 2018). I work
as a staff nurse on the medical unit of a hospital and informatics is associated with my current
practice system. We use Cerner as the charting system. It is helpful in daily charting,
receiving as well as processing orders, medication reconciliation and other work-related
tasks. In dynamic documentation purpose, it is used as documentation tool. This system has
saved our time and clicks.
Various literatures or scholarly articles are available in this topic that clearly
illustrates its impact on the experiences of nurses. In healthcare settings, the implementation
of Electronic Health Record system is significantly growing. With the advancement of
technology, it has come out as the necessity in healthcare. It is efficient enough in the
management of nursing records and safety of the patients. Nursing staffs are urged to
embrace the EHR system into their working practice to reduce the time required for
documentation so that they can spend more time in providing quality care to the patients. In
fact, after the implementation of EHR, it has been found in a study that nursing staffs spent
more time on direct care compared with the time spent on patient care using a paper-based
system (Munyisia, Yu & Hailey, 2014).However, there are some ethical issues associated
with the EHR as in many studies it has been analyzed that use of EHR in the clinical setting
causes time-consuming data entry, degradation of clinical documentation and others