Introduction
The Electronic Medical Record is currently used in hospitals due to an overflow of increased levels of data in the healthcare institution. The record upholds the relevant data that facilitates an effective health care delivery by the nurse practitioners. This technology has the capacity of generating a complete record of various activities or encounters that the patient has had with the clinic. In addition, it creates support that serves as a source of evidence, thus providing quality management and outcome reporting of disease surveillance for a clinical setting (Levine, 2009).
My Thoughts About the Need for an Integrated Electronic Patient Record as a Patient
As a patient, I think that there is a need for integrating the electronic medical record in a healthcare institution as it is cost-effective since the patients who are suffering from terminally ill conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, or the aging sick are properly served. This is because the technology has monitoring capabilities that provide around-the-clock observation through mobile communications and other technologies, and thus able to save lives and reduce the health care cost.
Levine(2009) states that the presence of current technology in the medical services effectively monitors the patients through the use of sensors, and blood pressure monitors, among others as it facilitates diagnosis even in remote areas. In addition, it also prevents unnecessary care since monitoring the patients’ health status from remote areas reduces considerably routine visits to the hospital since the patient only needs to visit the health care institution when a need arises (Andersen, Rise & Kominski, 2007).
My Thoughts About the Need for an Integrated Electronic Patient Record as a Nurse
As a nurse, I think that Integrating technology prevents errors in the medical system since it serves to replace imperfect persons with programmed systems, thus learning to put into operation new healthcare technologies (Andersen, Rise & Kominski, 2007). The progress in medical technology has little risk compared to the lack of using this technology. This is because a number of medical actions usually involve a lot of unknowns and are associated with errors such as prescription errors that result from poor handwriting, poor communication within the health care staff which eventually has the possibility of harming the patients.
The importance of integrating the electronic medical record in a clinical setting is essential because it acts as decision support. The decision support mechanism helps to prompt and give an alert where the clinical practitioners are not complying with professional as well as ethical practices. In addition, the electronic medical record contains Electronic communication and connectivity, thus eliminating problems that may result from miscommunication between the health care practitioners (Institute of Medicine, 2001).
Challenges of Implementation Electronic Medical Record
Implementation of electronic health cards requires adequate finance that will cater for the initial hardware and software cost, maintenance of the hardware and software cost, upgrades of the software, among others. Implementation of technology is also associated with the training of medical practitioners. The challenge of training presents itself when people are not open to innovation, and especially the workers who are satisfied with their work (Institute of Medicine, 2001).
Another major setback on the part of patient confidentiality is the level of privacy. This is because the patient’s information cannot be guaranteed to be strictly private. However, the U.S Senate passed a law that made it illegal to gain unauthorized access to personal medical information for reasons other than health care liberation, operations, and compensation (Andersen, Rise and Kominski, 2007).
References
Andersen, R. Rice, T. & Kominski, G. (2007). Changing the US health care system: key issues in health services policy and management. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons
Institute of Medicine (US). (2001). Crossing the quality chasm: a new health system for the 21st century. New York, NY: National
Levine, R. (2009). Shock therapy for the American Health Care System: Why comprehensive Reform is needed. Goleta, CA: ABC – CLIO Publishers