Using EHR in an Emergency Room Setting and Its Impact on Patient Safety

¶ … Electronic Health Records in an Emergency Room Setting

Using EHR in an Emergency room setting and its impact on patient safety

Using electronic health records in an emergency room setting and their impact on patient safety

Electronic health records or EHRs are computerized systems by which medical records can be stored. They often improve quality of care provided by enabling health care workers to focus their energy and time to providing care rather than retrieving and filing records. They also provide other benefits including ease of storage, modification and retrieval of medical records. This is because they provide a search facility that is better than the paper-based record system. Secondly, they also require less amount of space to store records since the records are stored electronically. Another major benefit of electronic health records is that they allow sharing of records. These records can often be compressed and shared with other health care workers in the same or different institutions. They also provide a better level of security by allowing records to be transmitted securely through encryption and password protection Winthereik, Ploeg, & Berg, 2007.

EHRs can also be used in emergency rooms to reduce the amount of time spent retrieving and modifying records.

Implementation of EHRs in emergency rooms

In emergency rooms, EHRs would need to be rolled out in a slow but sure process to enable a smooth transition between the paper-based system and EHR. This will enable the health care providers to continue in their roles even when the system is being set up. The major aspect to be considered is that the implementation needs to be carefully planned and change management processes should be set up to ensure the staff do not resist the EHR once it is set up. This can be done by ensuring the staff are aware of the advantages that the EHR provides as well as how they can be able to use it to ease their tasks. They also need to understand how they need to change their activities and tasks in order to use the EHRs.

In any implementation of an EHR, there is need to consider the day-to-day activities of the facility. In an emergency room, the most important activities that take place are often life-saving and other activities that provide acute care to patients. Therefore, the EHR would need to allow the emergency room to continue providing these services. This can be done by ensuring the EHR captures the patient's information at the point of triage and that these can be transmitted to the doctors and nurses providing care Greenhalgh, Potts, Wong, Bark, & Swinglehurst, 2009()

In emergency rooms, EHRs can be used to standardize practice and ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) by enabling health care providers to use ICD-10 classification for diagnoses and procedures. This also allows for the standard of care to be maintained according to HIPAA standards and for these to be transferrable with other facilities and departments with ease Pagliari, Don, & Singleton, 2007()

Patient safety and EHRs

EHRs provide many benefits to patients and improve their safety. First is that they often have sections for storing specific information such as age, sex, allergies, immunizations, diagnoses, differential diagnoses and medications. Whenever a new entry is being made into the EHR, the information is often being cross-checked against other previous information in the system to ensure that there are not adverse reactions that can come up as a result of drug interactions or allergic reactions. With EHRs, there is often a marked reduction in errors in prescriptions Kumar & Aldrich, 2010.

This is because they provide warnings to doctors when they prescribe drugs that would bring adverse reactions.

EHRs also integrate with other department such as the laboratory and radiology departments. This allows for physicians to get a detailed and exact view of the patient information and this allows them to make accurate diagnoses and treat the patients with greater accuracy. Therefore, the quality of care is improved through better organization of information and its timely and efficient presentation to ensure that the physician understand exactly what they need to be treating.