Electronic Health Records: Benefits, Implementation, and Standards

This report provides a comprehensive overview of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), highlighting their significance in modern healthcare. It begins by defining EHRs as digital versions of patient paper charts and emphasizes their role in providing real-time, patient-centered records. The report details the contents of EHRs, including medical history, treatment plans, medications, and test results, and explains their benefits, such as improved data tracking, patient identification for screenings, and overall care enhancement. Furthermore, it explores how EHRs contribute to organizational effectiveness by improving patient care, care coordination, and practice efficiencies. The report also discusses the HITECH Act and its role in promoting EHR adoption, outlining implementation steps like practice readiness assessment, system selection, and staff training. Additionally, it covers the functions of EHR systems, including streamlining clinician workflow and supporting evidence-based decision-making, as well as the future trends and EHR standards such as HL7 and FHIR. The report concludes by emphasizing the potential of EHRs to enhance patient engagement and improve healthcare delivery.

Electronic Health Records
or EHR

Electronic health records:
• Digital version of a patient’s paper chart
• Real time patient centered records (Kowitlawakul
et al. 2015)
• Make information available to users securely as
well as instantly
• Contain medical as well as treatment histories of
patients
• Useful in avoiding communication issues
• Reduces medical errors

What does it contain?
• Medical history of patient, treatment plans,
medication, dates for immunization, radiology
images, laboratory test results and allergies
• Helps in providing access to evidence based tools
which the providers can utilize for making
decisions about how to care for patients
(Kowitlawakul et al. 2014)
• Also helps in automating and streamlining
provider workflow

What are the benefits of using electronic medical health records?
• Helps in tracking data over the period of time
• Helps in identification of patients who have their
dues for screenings as well as preventive visits
• Helps in monitoring how patients measure in
particular parameters like in the cases of
vaccinations as well as blood pressure readings
(Nguyen, Belluci & Ngyen 2014)
• Helps in improving overall care in the healthcare
practices

EHR can help in developing patient care by:
• Reduction of the incidence of different types of
medical error through the procedure of improving
clarity and accuracy of the medical records
• Helps in making health information readily
available to students
• Helps in reduction in the duplication of the tests
• Helps in reduction in delays (Abramson et al.
2014)
• Helps patients in being well informed to take
better life decisions

How does HER help in developing
organizational effectiveness:
• Helps in improving patient care
• Helps in improving care coordination
• Helps in developing practice efficiencies as well
as cost savings
• Helps in increasing participation of patients
• Helps in improving diagnostics as well as patient
outcomes in the healthcare centers

HITECH ACT
• HITECH ACT also called the Health Information Technology
for Economic and Clinical Health Act is one of the important
components of the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009.
• It represents the first substantial commitment of the
Federal resources of the nation.
• It supports the widespread adoption of the EHRs by
healthcare professionals
• On august 2012, about 54% of the Medicaid and Medicare
eligible professionals were seen to have registered for the
meaningful use of the incentive program.

How can it be implemented:
• Assessing the practice readiness of the
healthcare professionals
• The proper planning of the approach of gathering
information during the assessment phase
• Selecting as well as upgrading to a certified HER
(right HER system should be introduced in the
practice (Samuels et al. 2015)
• Proper conducting of training and implementation
of the EHR system

Continued:
• Achieving meaningful use that include successful
demonstration of the meaningful use of the
systems
• Reassessing what is learnt from the training and
everyday utilization of the systems
• Continuous improvement of quality by
emphasizing the continuous evaluation of the
practice goals and improving workflow

Function of the system:
• The system helps in automating access to
healthcare professionals, patients and family
members to different important information
• Has the potential to streamline the clinician’s
workflow
• Support the care related activities indirectly or
directly through different interfaces
• Helps in supporting evidence based decision
support
• Helps in quality management
• Helps in outcome reporting

What does the electronic health
record contain?
• It contains different types of health information of patients:
• Diagnoses
• Administrative and billing data
• Progress notes
• Medical histories
• Patient demographics
• Vital signs
• Immunization dates
• Allergies
• Medications
• Lab and test results
• Radiology images

What are the futures of HER?
• Developing a more comprehensive narrative of
that of the patients
• Helping in reduction of the data entry burden
• Helping in enabling better patient engagement
• This would also help in including remote
monitoring
• Helping in allowing more precision medicine
• Helps in increasing transparency
• Also helps i offering more patient centered care
delivery

EHR standards:
• These standards are mainly formed to
certify different electronics health records
are successfully helping to solve
meaningful purposes.
• It also ensures that EHRs possess
necessary technical capabilities as well as
different security safeguards.

The health It community has helped in developing a number of
interoperability standards:
• HL7 also called the Health Level Seven International is a set
of international criteria. This helps in transferring of
different clinical as well as administrative data.
• Smart Health IT can be described as the open standard
based technology platform. This helps in enabling people
for creating applications that run across the different
healthcare systems including EHRs.
• FHIR is the FAST Healthcare interoperability resources is a
web based series of different types of tools that comes
under the category of HL7

References:
• Abramson, E. L., McGinnis, S., Moore, J., & Kaushal, R. (2014). A statewide
assessment of electronic health record adoption and health information
exchange among nursing homes. Health services research, 49(1pt2), 361-
372.
• Kowitlawakul, Y., Chan, S. W. C., Pulcini, J., & Wang, W. (2015). Factors
influencing nursing students' acceptance of electronic health records for
nursing education (EHRNE) software program. Nurse Education Today, 35(1),
189-194.
• Kowitlawakul, Y., Chan, S. W. C., Wang, L., & Wang, W. (2014). Exploring
faculty perceptions towards electronic health records for nursing
education. International nursing review, 61(4), 499-506.
• Nguyen, L., Bellucci, E., & Nguyen, L. T. (2014). Electronic health records
implementation: an evaluation of information system impact and contingency
factors. International journal of medical informatics, 83(11), 779-796.
• Samuels, J. G., McGrath, R. J., Fetzer, S. J., Mittal, P., & Bourgoine, D. (2015).
Using the electronic health record in nursing research: Challenges and
opportunities. Western journal of nursing research, 37(10), 1284-1294.

Thank you