It should be noted that the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) has benefits for both patients and healthcare institutions. EHRs allow streamlining patient care and improving its quality to a significant degree. In the long run, if EHRs are employed across the majority of healthcare organizations, it will enable making considerable savings at the local and national levels. Health providers may easily and quickly access patient information when managing clients, which speeds up the process significantly (McGonigle & Garver Mastrian, 2017). If a physician can handle patients quicker, this implies that they can schedule more clients. In addition, the use of EHRs excludes the possibility of duplicating tests or procedures, which makes the process of healthcare more accurate and fast while decreasing the costs for the institution. These factors may potentially result in increased patient and employee satisfaction. Importantly, such a system eliminates the possibility of losing patient information since the data is stored securely and may be accessed instantly. In contrast with paper documentation, electronic records can be backed up easily.
EHRs could be made even more useful if they are optimized to reduce the burden on healthcare specialists, who currently need to input all the information manually. Therefore, if this issue is resolved, this will result in greater employee satisfaction since the load of work will be decreased. Also, they will be able to concentrate more on handling patients rather than filling up information (Adler-Milstein et al., 2015). Instead of adding new functionality, such approaches as data visualization or the application of artificial intelligence may be considered. In this case, healthcare specialists will not need to learn new functions, but they will rather rely on technology.
References
Adler-Milstein, J., DesRoches, C. M., Kralovec, P., Foster, G., Worzala, C., Charles, D.,… Jha, A. K. (2015). Electronic health record adoption in US hospitals: Progress continues, but challenges persist. Health Affairs, 34(12), 2174-2180.
McGonigle, D., & Garver Mastrian, K. (2017). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage.