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04/20/2019

Electronic Health Records

Question 1

Electronic Health Records incorporate the ability to store all healthcare information about patients and the information can also be shared through electronic means to effectively deliver services. They provide very accurate information about patients that is up to date boosting the point of care. The system ensures that patient records can be easily accessed to enhance efficient care. Information can be shared without any risk of leaking between patients and other clinicians. Healthcare providers can now be able to provide the correct diagnosis to patients and reduce the number of medical errors to enhance the provision of safer care. The system ensures that the patients and the doctors interact efficiently to improve healthcare convenience.

Drug prescription is another area that has definitely been improved because now it is faster and reliable. Documentation is now more accurate and can clearly be seen and the security of patients data is now more efficient financially, there has been increased productivity maintain the work and life balance for the employees (Miotto, Kidd, & Dudley, 2016). Health care providers can now meet their business goals because of increased efficiency. Costs have been reduced by a considerable amount because the paperwork has decreased and there is minimal duplication of work.

Question 2

The estimated costs for EHR may vary according to the size of your firm. The upfront cost for deployment of a cloud EHR is estimated at $26000 while the yearly costs are estimated at $8000. In a period of five years, the total costs will add up to $58000 dollars. For the on-premise EHR, the upfront cost is $33000, yearly it sums up to $4000 and in a period of five years it will add up to 48,000 dollars. In some specific examples, a typical multi-physician firm can spend up to 162000 dollars to implement such a system for the first time and 85500 dollars for maintenance costs for the first year. The estimations also showed that 611 hours were used by the teams in the preparation and implementation of the whole system. According to medical economics, in a study of thirty healthcare practices, the average cash spent on buying hardware was 5900 dollars plus software and network connections. 3094 dollars on average was used for IT and other supporting costs. On average, depending on the size of the practice, some organizations spend more than others on such systems.

Question 3

Health information systems have been inpatient confidentiality and safety of personal information but there have been some concerns recently. There are patient concerns and institution concerns. Some of the patient concerns include; privacy and confidentiality. Patient records, diagnosis, and treatment are private and confidential and must be protected although the data can be accessed by concerned physicians with the permission of the patient and for payment and administrative purposes.

Another concern is security the patient’s data should be secured and Health centers should follow the information security guidelines developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Most health workers use their mobile phones to communicate about patients, how secure this is has been a concern. In the case that these guidelines are violated the consequences may include civil and criminal penalties for the health institutions and health care providers. The data might also be hacked or destroyed thus security measure against such should be put in place in all health care centers with HIS.

Question 4

Electronic health care records provide the complete records of the patient with his/her information. These records also include the patient’s narrative of his condition. With this, they are able to give a correct diagnosis which is accurate and specific depending on the information that is easily accessible in the system (Miotto, Kidd, & Dudley, 2016). This system can expose any possible safety issues that may arise and alert the clinician so that he can take possible measures to curb these threats. EHR’S can easily detect operational problems in an instant. The systems are quick at finding out any allergies in a patient and any problems that may arise from the prescription of new medication and take a new course of action to treat the possible medical condition.

Question 5

The HIPAA rule on privacy establishes set national standards that are aimed at protecting an individual’s medical records and any other personal information relating to the person. This is inclusive of health plans they have taken, all healthcare clearing houses and all providers of healthcare all forms of healthcare electronically. According to this rule, there need to be appropriate safeguards that are needed to protect all information about the health of a person (Rothstein, 2016). This rule, therefore, has set certain limits as to how much information can be provided to other people without the knowledge of the specific patient. It also gives all patients the right to access their information regarding their healthcare condition inclusive of rights to examine all copies of their health records and even obtain a copy of the records. If need be, they need to request any corrections that they need to be made on their copies.

References

Campanella, P., Lovato, E., Marone, C., Fallacara, L., Mancuso, A., Ricciardi, W., & Specchia, M. L. (2015). 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.

Miotto, R., Li, L., Kidd, B. A., & Dudley, J. T. (2016). Deep patient: an unsupervised representation to predict the future of patients from the electronic health records. Scientific reports, 6, 26094.

Rajkomar, A., Oren, E., Chen, K., Dai, A. M., Hajaj, N., Hardt, M., ... & Sundberg, P. (2018). Scalable and accurate deep learning with electronic health records. NPJ Digital Medicine, 1(1), 18.

Rothstein, M. A. (2016). The end of the HIPAA privacy rule? Currents in contemporary bioethics. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 44(2), 352-358.