Emerging Technology Brief NUR 514

Emerging Technology Brief

Today, the health care system is characterized by massive breakthroughs in health technologies. These technologies are promising in changing the treatment modalities for many diseases and impacting how health care is delivered. Consequently, the identified emerging health care technology that has the potential to overcome current or emerging barriers to care is electronic health records (EHR).

EHR connotes a digital adaptation of patients’ paper chart. It contains electronic format of a collection of patient health information. EHRs characterizes real-time, patient-oriented records that convey available patient information securely and immediately to the permitted users (Ammenwerth et al., 2017). Although EHRs contain patients’ medical and treatment histories, the system is also designed to provide wider view of patient’s care. Essentially, EHRs play serve critical purpose in health care setting by automating and streamlining the workflow of health care providers, containing diagnoses, medical histories, laboratory and tests results, treatment plans, radiology images, immunization dates, and allergies of a given patient. Finally, they also play a role of allowing accessibility to evidence-based tools that can help care givers to make informed decision about patient care.

The introduction of EHR has ensured significant transformation in health care delivery. To begin with, EHR serves as a crucial tool to manage broad and labor-intensive paperwork health records in a more effective way, which ultimately minimizes the cost of storage, transcription, and re-filling (Peters & Khan, 2014). Besides, since the EHR contains all the patient information, it significantly lowers the chances of occurrences of medical errors and also assists in enhancing the patient health by fostering effective management of the diseases. Moreover, EHR facilitates the process of getting, organizing, scrutinizing, and presenting health data to ease decision making process. EHR also minimizes the risk of health data duplication since it is possible to share files across various health care systems including adjusting and updating them, thus, reducing risk of lost data. Other benefits include facilitation of quality healthcare delivery and increased health care safety (Cowie et al., 2017).

The ethical issues that accompany the incorporation of the EHR include the consideration of the security of health data and also protection of the privacy and confidentiality of the patient information (Heart, Ben-Assuli & Shabtai, 2017). Therefore, the implementation of EHR should consider regulatory standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Privacy Rule and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). These regulations play an important role in protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the health records of the patients and also helping in avoiding the legal liability.

Essentially, EHR can improve access to care by increasing efficiencies in workflow. It does this by lowering the required time in pulling charts, enhancing scheduling of patient appointment, enhancing access to inclusive patient data, allocating remote access to patients’ charts, and assisting in managing the prescription. On the other hand, EHR promotes patient safety and quality by improving health management, enhancing communication and interface among the primary health providers and patients involved in the care, reducing needless patient investigations, and reductions of medical errors.

Emerging Technology Brief NUR 514

Emerging Technology Brief NUR 514

References

Ammenwerth, E., Lannig, S., Hörbst, A., Muller, G., & Schnell‐Inderst, P. (2017). Adult patient access to electronic health records. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (6).

Cowie, M. R., Blomster, J. I., Curtis, L. H., Duclaux, S., Ford, I., Fritz, F., & Michel, A. (2017). Electronic health records to facilitate clinical research. Clinical Research in Cardiology, 106(1), 1-9.

Heart, T., Ben-Assuli, O., & Shabtai, I. (2017). A review of PHR, EMR and EHR integration: A more personalized healthcare and public health policy. Health Policy and Technology, 6(1), 20-25.

Peters, S. G., & Khan, M. A. (2014). Electronic health records: Current and future use. Journal of comparative effectiveness research, 3(5), 515-522.