Healthcare Costs Electronic Records Healthcare

As a member of the committee charged with designing an EHR at the facility, it is important to note that the new EHR process must not interfere with the nursing staff's ability to deliver safe, cost-effective care for their patients. The system would have to offer a method of comparing a patient's data from previous, current and past events. The system would also have to be able to adapt and support a continuous ongoing record of the patient's education and learning response from this facility and other encounters or visits. The system should be able to eliminate the need to constantly acquire baseline demographics data every time the patient visits this or any other facility. Access to the patient's data should be universal and seamless for the nursing staff that need access and who also have the proper credentials. The nurses also need the EHR system to offer access and quality for research purposes.

The EHR system will have to meet the nursing staff's needs to maintain and control the basic bureaucratic needs of the facility. In other words, the system will have to ensure administrative and documentation processes of all medications and treatments and in certain cases track cost of care without the nurses having to intervene. For example, when a Band-Aid is used on a patient and the nurse properly documents its use in the EHR, the system should be able to note the cost of the physical Band-Aid and seamlessly incorporate it into the patient's administrative record.

There is no doubt that the new EHRs have to be able to ease and even if possible improve the nursing team's documentation and quality of care processes. The system will have to be efficient for the nursing team. "The nursing process provides a way to identify the...

Also, one of the more important needs on the system by nursing is the requirement that the EHRs supports a database that ensures research, offers useful data to the administration and any clinicians while at the same time providing evidence and recognition of the nursing team's efforts and work in viable and measurable way that is structured in a language that nurses can understand and appreciate.
12.4 -- New and effective EHRs will be utilized by more than just one facility and even within a given facility many departments. The entire healthcare system made up of health insurance plans, governmental agencies like Medicare and Medicaid, hospitals, public health programs, clinics and clinicians, physicians, nurses, laboratories and radiologists and of course, the consumers themselves will be directly affected. Because of this, EHRs will have large amounts of a patient's information that other areas of the patient care process will not need access to at some point or many cases, ever. For example, the information need of an administrative aspect like billing will not require the same information by a trauma nurse in an emergency room setting.

Nurses will always require the clinical information regarding a patient's past, present and future medical needs. It is rare that the general nursing process requires access to a patient's current or past billing or payment information. The majority of interactions nurses have with…