One of the biggest advancements in healthcare IT technology over the past few decades is the use of electronic health record (EHR) systems.
According to The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, over 95% of hospitals possess an EHR – and for good reason. EHRs come with a list of benefits, including easier record management, centralized record storage, faster record updates, simpler record transfers, and more.
Studies have shown that EHRs can help improve patient safety and can produce measurable improvements to patient outcomes. So, how does an EHR improve patient safety? Read on to learn more.
Electronic Health Records Fail To Detect Many Medication Errors
It’s no secret that EHRs are helpful for healthcare organizations. In a national physician survey, doctors noted the following benefits of EHR systems:
EHRs provide clear advantages for how clinics manage patient records, but how do those benefits connect to your EHR and patient safety? Let’s look at a few examples.
When EHR systems rose to prominence throughout the 1970s and 1980s, clinicians quickly realized the communication advantages of digitized health records over their paper counterparts, including the fact that:
Types Of Electronic Health Record (ehr) Systems In 2023
If a patient needs to be referred to a specialist for a more serious issue, it’s easy for the primary care provider to transmit all relevant documentation to the specialist in a safe and secure way.
These EHR safety tools automatically pull data from electronic records to support a clinician’s care strategy. While CDSS alerts can span a broad range of healthcare applications, they typically involve helping providers with decision-making at the point of care. Clinical decision support systems can help with the following:
CDSS solutions have been validated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an effective way to improve patient outcomes. However, the system must be built on a robust and up-to-date EHR platform, as the CDSS is only as good as the patient data it has access to.
Clinician Satisfaction Before And After Transition From A Basic To A Comprehensive Electronic Health Record
Despite all of their education and training, physicians are still human and prone to human error. Even the best physicians may make errors when diagnosing complex problems, but fortunately, EHR patient safety tools have advanced to the point where misdiagnoses can be identified and addressed before damage is done.
These tools support safety by providing data and information crucial to each physician’s diagnosing process. The more prepared each physician is, the better the odds of a successful outcome for the patient.
Looking at your EHR and patient safety from a broader perspective, EHRs play an important role in large-scale population health by way of Meaningful Use and electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs).
How To Improve Electronic Health Record Usability And Patient Safety
Briefly, Meaningful Use refers to objectives that healthcare professionals must achieve to demonstrate their commitment to healthcare quality to be involved in the EHR Incentive Programs. Data for these programs is measured and reported through clinical EHR systems.
These measures relate to the general state of health services performed and how well a clinic provides safe, equitable, and timely care, including:
Clinics who want to participate in certain government programs (such as the Medicare and Medicaid Promoting Interoperability Programs) must report eCQMs and other EHR patient portal requirements regularly.
Role Of Ehr In Patient Safety
The public health advantage of doing so comes from the insights that researchers can glean from the data. With clinics from across the country reporting EHR-based eCQM metrics, national researchers (like those at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) can get insight into population health trends, care efficacy, and patient satisfaction.
Armed with this data, healthcare providers can better understand where they’re coming up short and develop new evidence-based strategies to improve patient outcomes.
Hospitals with more resources tend to be better equipped to provide care to those who need it. As such, a hospital’s administrative budget can have a notable impact on patient safety risks and quality of care. EHRs offer a solution by boosting staff efficiency and reducing health system administration costs.
Pdf] Electronic Health Records And Applications For Managing Patient Care
While EHR implementations do come with an upfront cost, they also produce measurable cost savings over time. Research published in The American Journal of Managed Care shows that hospitals with advanced EHRs could lower the cost of treatment per patient by an average of 9.6% compared with those without advanced EHRs.
How does your EHR improve patient safety? By giving clinicians the information technology tools they need for quality improvement of care and patient safety.
Of course, EHRs aren’t a new healthcare strategy, but their adoption is growing fast. The question these days isn’t whether clinics should implement an EHR; it’s how they should implement their EHR.
The Key To Maintaining Medical Records
Outsourcing to an experienced integration partner is the best way to ensure that your EHR project works as intended – and generates the ROI that your practice needs.
True North has years of experience in EHR implementation, with over 1, 000 successful EHR projects completed over the past 14 years alone. If you need help selecting or implementing an EHR solution, work with a provider who can walk with you every step of the way – from selection to implementation and providing ongoing support.
Ready to improve patient safety at your practice.. and to see how does ehr protect patient privacy? Contact us to get started with your EHR transformation today.Electronic health records have transformed modern medicine, giving doctors and nurses better data to guide care, supporting enhanced patient safety through new automated tools, and creating more efficient processes by connecting different health systems.
How Electronic Medical Records Can Improve Patient Safety
However, the design, customization, and use of electronic health records (EHRs) by doctors, nurses, and other clinicians can also lead to inefficiencies or workflow challenges and can fail to prevent—or even contribute to—patient harm. For example, an unclear medication list could result in a clinician ordering the wrong drug for a patient. Laboratory tests that are displayed without the date and time of the results could lead to clinical decisions based on outdated information. And failures of systems to issue alerts about harmful medication interactions—situations that can stem from changes made by facilities, how clinicians enter data, or EHR design—could lead to medical errors.
These safety hazards can be associated with EHR usability, which refers to the design and use of the technology and how individuals interact with it. Usability challenges can frustrate clinicians because they make simple tasks take longer, lead to workarounds, or even contribute to patient safety concerns. These challenges can stem not only from the layout of EHRs, but also from how the technology is implemented and operated in health care facilities; how clinicians are trained to use it; and how the EHR is maintained, updated, and customized. Each stage of EHR development and use—the software life cycle from development through implementation and use in a health care environment—can affect the usability and safety of the technology.
While usability and patient safety are related, not every usability challenge will represent a risk to patients, and not every risk to patients stems from an EHR usability problem. In fact, some changes to EHRs might improve safety but result in less-efficient workflows—for example, if clinicians were prompted to enter “lbs.” or “kg.” every time they entered a patient’s weight. But when a system is challenging to use or patient information is difficult for a clinician to find, safety risks could occur.
What Is Electronic Health Record (ehr)?
As part of federal criteria that provide the certification standards for EHRs, technology developers must state that they engage end users and conduct usability testing during design and development. However, the certification requirements can fall short in two ways when it comes to assessing whether the use of products contributes to patient harm.
First, current federal testing criteria do not address circumstances in which customized changes are made to an EHR as part of the implementation process or after the system goes live. Instead, current rules focus only on the design and development stage of the EHR. While federal regulations mandate the testing of certain safety-related features—such as medication-allergy checks—the requirements do not focus on whether those functions operate in a safe way.
The second key challenge is the absence of requirements and guidance on how to test clinician interaction with the EHR for safety issues. Clinical test cases, which are scenarios that reflect realistic patient conditions and how health care providers treat individuals, can help detect hazards. However, there are no clear criteria for what constitutes a rigorous test scenario. Similarly, some of the scenarios for certification, while testing that certain functions work, may not effectively evaluate the EHR for usability or safety. Current certification test cases can be too specific, lack relevant details, or may not test aspects of the EHR that are recognized as posing safety risks.
Safety In Healthcare: Tips For Maintaining Patient Health And Well Being
Unlike many other high-risk sectors, such as the airline and medical device industries, there is no standard for routinely testing health care software for safety issues and concerns.
To address these two challenges, The Pew Charitable Trusts, MedStar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, and the American Medical Association conducted a literature review and convened a multidisciplinary expert panel composed of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, EHR vendors, patients, and health information technology experts. This information led to the development of:
Use of the voluntary certification tenets and test cases by health care facilities and technology developers can improve the usability and safety of EHRs. They also allow for
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