Health Care - Introduction to the US Health Care Sector
chelseasturd
OUTLINE.docx· The three electronic health record (EHR) systems that I will be discussion in my week 7 assignment are eClinicalWorks, Allscripts Professional and Cerner PowerChart.
· eClinicalWorks is ranked number seven out of twenty five in EHRs for revenue on medical economics. This company has a low employee count of 5,000 employees working on a daily basis. They have EHR systems for both small practices and hospitals. They have a different system within the overall system for emergency dept, lab, pharmacy, operating rooms, med/surg, and also analytics for all of the different departments. I like that eClinicalWorks has a real time dashboard as to where some of the other EHRs that I researched updated at the end of the day and you had to restart your system in order to have an update. Also another feature that I thought could be successful is the Pharmacy build. The pharmacy clinic can actually build their own formulary, order medications and manage the larger complex orders. This system also provides a patient engagement portion to the EHR that can greatly benefit the facility. The smartphone app can keep regular patients informed about their upcoming appointments, medications that they are currently using, and even has a chat for your physician directly. The eClinicalWorks cloud is also private, which means that the systems performance will never be affected by another practice's upgrades or large search queries. Also, upgrades can be made when convenient for the particular practice using the system. As I was researching reviews for this EHR, all I could find were positive things from all over the US. Unfortunately, eClinicalWorks has not been used in many large scale facilities, such as an ASC, but I believe that may be because this is a smaller scale and private system.\
https://www.eclinicalworks.com/
· Allscripts Professional is ranked number three of twenty five for revenue on medical economics. Coming in at $1.45 billion for their revenue, this could mean that a lot of facilities use this version of EHR and it could be continuing to grow. This EHR is public, which means that it is combined with other facilities that use this same system. This could potentially cause glitches when the EHR is actually needed the most. Such as a patient coming in to be seen and the system not pulling up their documents and part medical information. The patient may have to wait until the system comes back up again to finish his/her appointment. This specific EHR is dedicated to both small facilities and larger facilities. The overall system is the same for both. So if someone is using this system for a small clinic, they cannot tailor it to their specifics needs. They have the same EHR system as a larger ASC. A pro would also be that Allscript was established back in 2007, so they have had plenty of time to evolve their system and become more patient friendly. Allscript offers education services for their users, which can prevent user error. They have an program within their system to detect issues before the issues are ever brought to the server. When I researched reviews, most facilities stated that this is a very user friendly EHR system, but it has several glitches that could be worked out before the upgrades.
· Cerner Ambulatory EHR is rated number one for the highest revenue at $2.67 billion for all 50 states. This particular EHR is mainstreamed and focused on the physicians workflow, where as the other two are focused on either patients or the whole facility. Cerner Ambulatory EHR is designed for larger ASC's and could be extremely diffucult is a smaller facility wished to use this EHR. The system is personalized based on department, so each section within the ASC is able to design their program the way that best suites them. As a patient, there is the option to have your health records switched between hospitals that also use Cerner. It could be a disadvantage that they do not link with other systems, but fortunately, there are several clinics and hospitals that use Cerner. The patients also have access to all of their records online, but not through a smartphone app. This EHR also offers plenty more options within their system than most EHR systems - Behavioral Health, Imaging, Specialty Hospital, Patient Engagement, and Performance Improvement are just a few more options. They also offer a "Wellness Portal" which is an online portal that enables you to deliver personalized, meaningful and actionable wellness experiences. Within this portal it gives you access to the NCQA certified PHA assessments, the educational workshops, shows your team competitions, promotes incentives and rewards, etc. This could be very beneficial to the hospital using this system.
