Team Collab

Zambia892

Exemplar-Assessment_3.pdf

Home >Applied Sciences homework help >Team Collab

Manuscript for Publication

Learner’s Name

School, Capella University

Course ID, Title

Instructor

September, 2019

Lisa Oll

Manuscript for Publication

An electronic health record (EHR) is a comprehensive digitized version of a patient chart.

It not only provides standard clinical data to users, but also provides patient information instantly

(The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, n.d.). It can include

a patient’s medical history, test results, and treatment plan. In the following assessment, we will

discuss how EHRs provide a broader perspective about a patient’s treatment plan to an

interprofessional health care team. Since EHRs are digitized, they allow interprofessional health

care teams to easily share a patient’s clinical data with other health care organizations. We will

also discuss how the use of EHRs affects patient outcomes and how their use can be improved.

Electronic Health Records and Interprofessional Health Care Teams

In a qualitative study, 63 respondents were interviewed. The respondents included the

staff of patient-centered medical homes, ranging from front-desk staff to physicians. The

respondents felt that EHRs were responsible for better communication within the team, which

was due to easier access to patient information. With EHRs in place, workflows in a health care

setting can be streamlined in a manner that allows physicians to concentrate on more

complicated areas of care. The other members of the team will then be able to take on more tasks

and assume more responsibility. According to the survey respondents, EHRs allowed an easy

distribution of tasks within the team and helped avoid task duplication. This distribution of tasks,

according to the survey, could be enabled through message distribution from the patients’ portal

to the health care providers’ inboxes and task management software (O’Malley, Draper,

Gourevitch, Cross, & Scholle, 2015).

When incorporated into protocols and standing orders, EHRs were responsible for better

team structure and directions for more team member autonomy. This could benefit medical

Lisa Oll

assistants and nurses, who could have the authority to delegate tasks, such as health screenings or

vaccinations, even before the physician meets the patient. While EHRs have the potential to

streamline processes, they also pose challenges for an interprofessional health care team. These

challenges include the inability to keep track of patients with specific needs, inadequate

assistance for health care management, and lack of accountability and standardization of data

(O’Malley et al., 2015).

Most health care practices that were a part of the qualitative study maintained a registry

of their patients. However, there was variation in the integration of these registries with

electronic health records. A lack of registry functionality was seen in the EHRs of certain health

care practices. Other practices were found to not use the registry provided with the EHR either

because they already had a preexisting registry or because the registry did not meet their specific

needs. The practices with preexisting registries were not able to integrate a new registry because

of limited resources. Some respondents of the study also revealed that they had to maintain two

separate systems, which could not communicate with each other (O’Malley et al., 2015).

The practices that used EHRs and their built-in registries had customized them to

generate tailored reports. Respondents that were unhappy with EHR registry functionality were

dissatisfied with the software responsible for generating reports. The respondents of the study

also felt that EHRs did not have the ability to track the data of a certain set of patients over a

long period. This means that health care teams could not make decisions involving long-term

care plans for patients (O’Malley et al., 2015).

Most EHRs at these practices did not have a care management tool, which would help

health care professionals track patients’ progress through observation notes. For this, health

professionals had to use a separate system, as EHRs lacked care management. The challenges

Lisa Oll

associated with EHR use had partial workarounds that were not permanent solutions, which

would cease to work once care practices upgraded to a newer version of their electronic health

records. Another challenge posed by EHRs was that the responsibility of the data fed into the

EHRs could not be traced to one individual from a health care team. Some professionals from

large health care organizations felt that data entry was also affected by legal and compliance

departments. As health care teams become larger and grow more diverse, data entry tends to get

affected when conflicts such as scope of practice arise (O’Malley et al., 2015).

Another common challenge in the smooth functioning of EHRs is inconsistency in the

structure and location of data because of the diverse nature of health care teams. The solutions to

this challenge include defining the team members responsible for specific data inputs,

maintaining consistency in the terminology used, and standardizing methods of data entry. Some

respondents felt that it was difficult to retrieve data for quality reporting as data had to be

retrieved from different parts of records (O’Malley et al., 2015).

Effect of Electronic Health Records on Health Outcomes

Electronic health records can provide comprehensive data in a manner that is not possible

with data on paper charts. According to a study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2013,

EHRs are equipped to keep health care providers up to date on preventive and screening

treatment procedures for patients. Since the possibility of illegibility is removed with EHRs, the

probability of medical errors is reduced (as cited in Manca, 2015). Physicians are able to attend

to more patients because of the availability of comprehensive patient data. Electronic health

records also enable physicians to easily look up reports and results. Electronic health records

allow physicians to access patient charts virtually, improve the availability of laboratory results,

issue alerts for medication errors, and give preventive care reminders (Manca, 2015).

Lisa Oll

According to Rose et al., a clinical trial of 21 health care practices demonstrated that

EHRs contributed to improvement in disease outcomes in patients with hypertension. Following

an EHR intervention, these patients received screening and advice on alcohol dependence and

abuse. This preventive measure led to the patients’ experiencing a reduction in blood pressure (as

cited in Manca, 2015). As stated by Xu et al., consistency in the usage of EHRs will help identify

patients who require care interventions such as cancer screening (as cited in Manca, 2015).

According to Delbanco et al., apart from facilitating the assignment of tasks to members of a

health care team, EHRs let patients book appointments remotely (as cited in Manca, 2015). The

use of personal health records and patient portals allow patients to be closely involved in the

management of their own care (Manca, 2015).

According to Akenroye, Baskin, Samnaliev, and Stack, when guidelines associated with

the use of EHRs are adhered to, EHRs tend to affect how resources are used and aid in cost

reduction. Electronic health records reduce the wastage of resources, which is demonstrated

through reduction in medication errors and reduction in the use of ineffective therapies (as cited

in Campanella et al., 2015). According to Fritz, Cleland, and Brennan, the use of appropriate

information technology, such as EHRs, in the delivery of health care contributes to increasing

efficiency. Zhivan and Diana state that the benefits of adopting EHRs surpass the cost of the

technology. Zabada, Singh, and Munchus find that the adoption of this technology positively

affects satisfaction ratings by patients (as cited in Campanella et al., 2015).

Recommendations to Improve Electronic Health Record Use

To change EHR use, the stakeholders involved in health care need to be considered. For

any changes in EHRs, physicians, nurses, and support staff must be consulted. Since physicians,

nurses, and support staff engage with health care infrastructure the most, their inputs will help

Lisa Oll

improve the design and efficiency of electronic health records. Another group that needs to be

considered while making changes in the EHR process is front-office staff. It is important to take

them into account because they are responsible for feeding the system with preliminary

information about a patient.

As health care systems become more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to make

EHRs efficient enough to help manage the complex information clinicians are responsible for,

such as the knowledge of administrative processes, patient backgrounds, and context. The

efficiency of EHRs can be improved by integrating and aligning EHR systems to health care

systems to support the delivery of complex care before EHR systems are implemented. For

instance, a concierge medical practice across 40 cities in the United States called One Medical

developed an in-house EHR system that was designed to support the kind of health care and

patient relationship it was aiming for (Davenport, Hongsermeier, & Mc Cord, 2018).

To make existing EHRs more intelligent and flexible, artificial intelligence (AI) can be

incorporated. Incorporating AI will allow data extraction from free text and will help provide

new insight into data from clinical notes. AI can be used to develop interpretative algorithms that

are capable of creating models from data to warn care providers of high-risk conditions such as

heart failure. Natural language processing allows AI to capture clinical notes, letting care

professionals focus on patients rather than worrying about patient data. Machine learning and AI

can easily adapt to user preferences, not only making them user-friendly but also helping

improve clinical outcomes (Davenport et al., 2018).

Conclusion

As health care incorporates new technology, more caution is required on the part of

multidisciplinary users. These multidisciplinary users, including front-office staff, must be taken

Lisa Oll

into consideration while incorporating changes in EHRs because they engage with the system the

most. The immediate need is to make technology user-friendly as it becomes more advanced.

Electronic health records have helped provide tools to health care professionals to make care

delivery safer. While this has been achieved, health care is increasingly becoming complex.

Health care now requires streamlining, which AI can help with. Incorporating AI into EHRs will

pave the way to making health care more patient centered and disease management easier.

Lisa Oll

References

Campanella, P., Lovato, E., Marone, C., Fallacara, L., Mancuso, A., Ricciardi, W., & Specchia,

M. L. (2016). The impact of electronic health records on healthcare quality: A systematic

review and meta-analysis. The European Journal of Public Health, 26(1), 60–64.

https://doi.org/ 10.1093/eurpub/ckv122

Davenport, T. H., Hongsermeier, T. M., & Mc Cord, K. A. (2018, December 13). Using AI to

improve electronic health records. Harvard Business Review.

https://hbr.org/2018/12/using-ai-to-improve-electronic-health-records

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (n.d.). What is an

electronic health record (EHR)? https://www.healthit.gov/faq/what-

electronic-health-record-ehr

Manca, D. P. (2015). Do electronic medical records improve quality of care? Yes. Canadian

Family Physician, 61(10), 846–847. https://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-

gov.library.capella.edu/pmc/articles/PMC4607324/?tool=pmcentrez&report=abstract

O’Malley, A. S., Draper, K., Gourevitch, R., Cross, D. A., & Scholle, S. H. (2015). Electronic

health records and support for primary care teamwork. Journal of the American Medical

Informatics Association, 22(2), 426–434. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocu029

Lisa Oll