The Effectiveness of Implementing an Electronic Health Record on Diabetes Care and Outcomes - Essay Example

The article ‘The Effectiveness of Implementing an Electronic Health Record on Diabetes Care and Outcomes’  focuses on assessing the impacts that electronic health records have on primary care of diabetes. A naturalistic experiment was carried out in the research.  The United States healthcare system aims at responding to the needs of the patients.  With the increase in population and complex diseases that are chronic reorganization within the healthcare system is necessary.  Different forms of IT facilitate and support the reorganization process. One of the forms is the use of electronic health record that provides a streamlined communication system between the physicians through use of universal records of the patient. The EHRs make the clinical guidelines available when care is being provided. Reviews on EHRs have shown that there is improved adherence to the set clinical guidelines (Ballard, 2012).

The research carried out took place in 2006 in a health Texas provider network that was already implementing the EHR system. The data was collected analyzed and conclusions made from the results. From the results, it was clear that implementing EHR had an immense impact on documented care and outcomes for diabetic patients.  The exposure to the system was associated with improvement in optimal care and individual process and outcome measures. However, the results did not show evidence that the use of EHR has effects on the most important measure of diabetes care. The study had a limitation of lack of randomization that prevented ruling out effects because of the unobserved differences between groups. Despite the limitations of the research, the assessment of the effect of E H R implementation shows optimal care is significant with the use of EHR (Ballard, 2012).