Challenges in Nursing Informatics: Adopting Electronic Health Records

This essay explores the challenges and barriers to the widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in healthcare settings within the context of nursing informatics. While EHRs offer numerous benefits, including improved quality of care, patient safety, and potential cost reduction in ambulatory services, their adoption rate remains suboptimal due to various factors. These obstacles include the time-consuming nature of training on EHR systems, high upfront financial costs, lack of necessary computer skills among some physicians, workflow disruptions caused by unfamiliarity with the systems, and concerns regarding the security and privacy of computerized patient information. The essay also notes the lack of incentives for quality improvement and the potential for EHR use to interfere with the patient-doctor relationship, along with practical issues like cluttered workspaces. Addressing these barriers is crucial to fully realizing the potential of EHRs in enhancing healthcare delivery.

Running head: NURSING INFORMATICS 1
Nursing Informatics
Name
Institution

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Electronic Health Records
Electronic health records may be referred to as computerized medical information
systems that are used to collect, display and store all information regarding a patient. There are
several positive effects of using EHRs in the healthcare setting but the rate of adoption of these
systems is still not high enough and in some instances, they meet resistance from patients
(Kohane, 2011). They represent one of the most essential tools for improving the quality of care
and patient safety. However, this may only be realized if the health practitioners can use these
systems more frequently to enjoy their benefits. It has been widely reported that a widespread
use of EHRs could also lead to a reduction in the cost of providing ambulatory services (Romano
& Stafford, 2011). It is, however, important to note that these systems are not usually user-
friendly are there are some considerable barriers to their adoption.
One of the barriers to the adoption of this system is that it may be time-consuming to
train how to use an EHR. In fact, reports have suggested that most physicians, even though they
needed this system, they in most cases lacked the time to learn new features of the system and
participate in further training (Ajami & Bagheri-Tadi, 2013). Additionally, there was this aspect
of an extremely high upfront financial cost that was required to implement the EHR systems.
This high initial cost put off the physicians thus being a barrier in their implementation.
Another barrier which further stressed the fact that the use of electronic health records is not
always user-friendly was the fact that it needed the possession of computer skills. It is, however,
important to note that some physicians lacked these skills (Ajami & Bagheri-Tadi, 2013). These
skills include listening to the complaints of the patient and assessing the medical relevance. The

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providers have made the mistake of undermining the complexity of this system and how it can be
difficult for use by the physicians.
Another obstacle which strengthens the argument that EHR is not user-friendly is that it
causes a workflow disruption. This is because the physicians sometimes fail to set aside some
quality time to properly familiarize themselves with this system. The familiarity required may
sometimes not be found in the most adept users of a computer (Ajami & Bagheri-Tadi, 2013).
This lack of familiarity with the electronic health record system may cause disruptions in the
workflow within a healthcare organization.
There are also concerns regarding security and privacy that are associated with the use of
electronic health record settings. There are additional concerns regarding confidentiality,
security, and privacy of patient information that are computerized (Fernández-Alemán, Señor,
Lozoya & Toval, 2013). Additionally, there is a lack of incentives with the use of EHR. The
implementation of this system could be increased by offering financial rewards to enhance
quality improvement. It is further important to note that the use of this system interferes with the
patient-doctor relationship. There are sometimes problems in interaction between the doctor and
the patient during the use of electronic health records. Interpersonal communication is thus
affected thus lowering the quality of health. Other barriers that show that this system is not user-
friendly may include cluttered workspace and lack of enough rooms for usage by the computers.

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References
Ajami, S., & Bagheri-Tadi, T. (2013). Barriers to adopting electronic health records (EHRs) by
physicians. Acta Informatica Medica, 21(2), 129.
Fernández-Alemán, J. L., Señor, I. C., Lozoya, P. Á. O., & Toval, A. (2013). Security and
privacy in electronic health records: A systematic literature review. Journal of biomedical
informatics, 46(3), 541-562.
Kohane, I. S. (2011). Using electronic health records to drive discovery in disease genomics.
Nature Reviews Genetics, 12(6), 417.
Romano, M. J., & Stafford, R. S. (2011). Electronic health records and clinical decision support
systems: impact on national ambulatory care quality. Archives of internal medicine,
171(10), 897-903.