Electronic Health Record of Patient: Benefits, Barriers & Solutions

This essay explores the use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in healthcare, highlighting their role in providing patient-centered, real-time access to medical information for authorized personnel. It details the benefits of EHRs, including improved patient participation, enhanced diagnostics, better patient outcomes, and cost-effective care. The essay also identifies barriers to EHR implementation, such as usability issues, technical challenges, privacy concerns, and costs. Furthermore, it suggests solutions to overcome these barriers, including enhancing security systems, implementing training programs, and providing computer education to healthcare employees. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of addressing these challenges to fully realize the potential of EHRs in improving healthcare quality and efficiency.

Running head: ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD OF PATIENT
Electronic Health Record of Patient
Name of the Student
Name of the Student
Author Note

1ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD OF PATIENT
An Electronic Health Record (EHR) is the digitalized version of the patient’s documents.
EHRs carry real-time, patient centered records and these information are instantly accessible to
the authorized person in a secure way. The main goal purpose of using a EHRs is to increase the
patient participation in the treatment process, improve the diagnostics and patient outcome, and
enhance the quality of the patient care and also to provide an efficient cost effective patient care.
The EHRs are composed of the patient history, diagnosis of the patient, medications of the
patients, pathological test results of the patient that is the laboratory and other test results. In
addition, the radiology images of the patients, any kind of allergy sensitivity, and date of
immunization are also mentioned in the EHR system. Moreover the information of the EHR can
be created and managed by health care workers of more than one health care organizations
(Department of Health and Human Service, 2019).
The EHRs implementation in the health care setting can face a few barriers such as
usability of the EHRs system, technical ability of the users of EHRs system, privacy issue related
to the EHRs, cost of the EHRs system. Moreover it can be said that, in an organization the
barriers of EHRs system can differ from one person to another. For example it can be said that,
in a hospital setting a nurse or a doctor may face different problem related to EHRs. The
usability challenge of a EHRs system may occur due to the multiple screen, unclear navigation
and also due to too much control buttons of the system. Lack of understanding the new
technology of the EHRs system may appear as a barrier in front of the users of that system in the
name of technical ability and it is very crucial to have computer knowledge to handle this
system. The rural health care persons and older age people may face such problem while using
this system. Many patients raise their concern about the security of the EHRs system as it has
immense risk of facing cyber-attacks (Department of Health and Human Service, 2019). In order

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to overcome the issue of cyber safety, the organization internally can enhance the security
system and they can impose penalty on the policy breaching person. In addition, training
program can be launched on new technologies and system so that the technical barriers of the
EHRs can be overcome and as a part of this program computer education can be given to the
employees (Hasanain & Cooper, 2014). These ways can be used to encounter the above
problems.

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References
Department of Health and Human Service (2019). What is an electronic health record (EHR)? |
HealthIT.gov. Healthit.gov. Available at: https://www.healthit.gov/faq/what-electronic-
health-record-ehr [Accessed 22 Jan. 2019].
Hasanain, R. A., & Cooper, H. (2014). Solutions to overcome technical and social barriers to
electronic health records implementation in Saudi public and private hospitals. Journal of
Health Informatics in Developing Countries, 8(1).