Question
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages associated with implementing and using a regional and national EHR.
Solution
Advantages
Electronic health record or EHR is a digital record of a patient’s overall health information. According to research, the regional and national EHR has positive outcomes of the clinic, society, and organization in the health care delivery. In a clinical setting, EHR has improved the quality of care given to patients (Bajwa, Singh, & De, 2017). With the system, providers can exercise preventive health. Moreover, EHR enhances patient data security and also enables the patients to have easy access to their medical records as compared to the traditional documentation.
For the organizational outcome, EHR offers medical practices a financial incentive from programs like Medicaid and Medicare. In addition, it is time saving when filling outpatient data since a provider can place a treatment order at a higher speed, while also enablingorganizations to minimize the consumption of resources like print forms. Finally, for the societal outcome, EHR contributes to improved population health outcomes. Medical facilities improve patients health by adopting improved medication management, which ultimately improves provider efficiency andreduces malpractice claims.
Disadvantages
Implementing the health record systems involves huge cost implications for the medical facilities. The practice’s workflow could also be affected as untrained clinicians learn how to incorporate the system. There could be a temporal loss in productivity and an ultimate reduction in revenue due to the time spent learning the system. Fundamentally, EHR could lead to interference with patient privacy and security concerns during the electronic exchange of patient records if there is unwarranted entry, such as system hacking (“Safety measures for EHR systems,” 2019). Finally, overdependence on the system could also lead to medical errors, as it changes medical power structure.
References
Bajwa, N. K., Singh, H., & De, K. K. (2017). Critical success factors in electronic health records (EHR) implementation. International Journal of Healthcare Information Systems and Informatics, 12(2), 1-17. DOI:10.4018/ijhisi.2017040101
Delisle, D. R., McLamb, A., & Inch, S. (2019). Transformation and your new EHR. The Communications and Change Leadership Playbook for Implementing Electronic Health Records, 1-154. DOI:10.4324/9780429447402
Safety measures for EHR systems. (2019). Security and Privacy of Electronic Healthcare Records: Concepts, paradigms, and solutions, 249-266. DOI:10.1049/pbhe020e_ch10