EMR Implementation and Patient Flow - Case Study Example

Implementing electronic health records Anna Fihar Electronic health record (EHR) is a digital format of the patient`s paper chart. Firstly EHR allowsimproving the quality of the health care. Also, it helps to reduce the cost of the health care, make care coordination, accuracy of the diagnostic better. EHR contains the following information about the patient: medical history, diagnoses, treatment plans, medications, immunization dates, allergies, laboratory and test results and radiology images.

In addition, EHR includes evidence – based tools that help physicians to make appropriate and effective diagnoses. Another benefit of the EHR is that all medical information can be created and supervised by authorized users. That`s option allowed providers to share the health information with the other health care providers to improve the quality and productivity of the diagnostic and treatment processes. But, the implementation process of the EHRs is not that quickly, easily and cheap because it requires some period of time for health providers education and adaptation of the health care system to the new model of the patient`s health information.

The most difficult environment for the EHRs implementation is an emergence department as there are a lot of barriers such as crowding, limited staffing and increased amount of interruptions. The main question is: “Whether the overflow clinic model could be quickly adapted to offload the emergency department for the implementation of the EHR?” The other important information that have to be quantitatively confirmed is the effects of the EHR implementation on time to medical provider, total patient`s length of stay (LOS), provider efficiency during and after the implementation of the EHR.

In addition, the quiet necessary question is: “How much time and training required for implementation and adoption of the software?”(Amanda L. Terry,2008) The data were gathered from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center emergence department during the 2 years of the EHR implementation. During this period the H1N1 flu pandemic occurred that lead to increased number of the patients. The results showed that the total length of stay during EHR implementation increased compared to the overall LOS before implementation.

It takes 6 months post- implementation to gain improved and stable LOS. I suggest that received results show that the process of the EHR is quite slow because of the different reasons and barriers existed in the emergence departments. For example, health care providers require more time to learn how to use EHR as they have busy workdays especially during the pandemic. (Stephanie Spellman Kennebeck,2012)Therefore, EHR has a lot of benefits. The most important ones are that EHR can highly increase the effectiveness and quality of the patient`s care and help for the cost saving.

But, the implementation of the EHR makes a lot of challenges to the health care system. Further investigations are needed to explore and improve the processes of EHR`s implementation and adoption in different health care systems.References:1. Amanda L. Terry.(2008). Implementing electronic health records. National Center for Biotechnology Information Online. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377228/2. Stephanie Spellman Kennebeck. (2012). Impact of electronic health record implementation on patient flow metrics in a pediatric emergency department.

National Center for Biotechnology Information Online. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3341791/