Power Point

Running head: ELECRONIC HEALTH RECORDS 1

ELECRONIC HEALTH RECORDS 8

ELECTRONIC HEALTH CARE RECORDS ANALYSIS

Stephanie Petit-homme

Miami Regional University

Health Care Informatics and Technology

Professor: Garcia Mercedes

Introduction

In recent years, the quality and quantity of provider documentation has been an area of concern in the health care field. Many initiatives have been adopted in the west to address this notion with the latest one being conducted through the centres for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) that institutes initiatives of meaningful use (MU) (Yadav et.al,2018). This has led to many healthcare organisations in the US to begin the implementation of electronic healthy records (EHRs). They increased pressure from the government has led to health organisations adopting EHRS in order to meet the Mu initiatives. The electronic health records are expected to bring a wave of revolutionary change in the health care field in the United States.

Electronic health records (EHRs) refer to an electronic version of health record of patients that are created and stored in paper chart. The electronic health record of a patient is held created, and managed by a healthcare organisation with access only being granted to health care professionals. This essay will focus on the EHRs as used in context of health informatics.

Goals of the product

The development of medical science calls for substantial information being necessitated by doctors in the treatment of patients. Healthcare systems based on handwriting cannot adapt to this rapidly increasing need for information. There are numerous administrative and objectives that prompts a healthcare facility to seek an EHR to perform the duties. In essence, the EHR functions as a central data point providing the basis for the information that will ensure that there is proper clinical design support, enhanced quality, billing and proper patient documentation is enhanced (Chen et.al, 2020).

One of the goals of her is to ensure proper documentation. The electronic health record device must ensure that there is a complete face to face encounter between the patient and the doctor. Such documentation should be fast and easy since the doctor’s time is acknowledged to be very valuable and that the physician may have a large number of patients to attend to (Cruz et.al, 2019). The items that should be include in the documentation of the EHR consist of the patient’s clinical history, laboratory results, pharmacy prescriptions and the doctors notes.

The EHR will also ensure that there is quality assurance within the health facility. In essence it ensure that physicals and hospitals are equipped with stratified methods of tracking the information that is needed in federal regulations and insurance companies. Since the EHR acts as a reference point, central to patient’s data where records are stored, it is easy to monitor with ease. Therefore, the information can be monitored to ensure that physicals are ordering the appropriate tests for the condition of the patient (Sherer et.al, 2016). The healthcare providers will able be able to offer a comprehensive and quality report to the federal government that can be used in making crucial decisions in the field.

The tracking of patient statistics such as care days and other services is a cumbersome process in health care facilities. This data as usually paramount in the tracking of trends in utilization, allocation of resources and financial reporting (VanLangen and Wellman, 2018). An EHR is crucial i9n the streamlining of these processes and ensures that ate data that is supplied is accurate and of real time. When the statistics of utilization and when paired with data on finances can be employed in the tracking of the healthcare inquired costs and improve efficiency within the facility.

Today, most healthcare records are usually paper based in charts. This notion makes it very cumbersome to transfer patient’s charts. In an instance where patients move or see other healthcare professionals, the patients have to prompt out their chart sent out to the new facility. Such a process is usually cumbersome since the chart must be photocopied and in order to be sent to them. The integration of EHR ensures that the problem is solved with eased transfer of patient’s records.

Billing are coding are crucial aspects in the healthcare industry today. Insurance companies and other Medicare facilities require accurate documentation of a patient encounter. Inadequate coding may lead to episodes of inaccurate billing. EHR technologies provision a solution to the problem by enhancing efficiency in documentation and reserving of diagnosis databases that helping producing healthcare claims that are accurate.

In a healthcare facility the confidentiality of the records of patients is crucial and at the forefront of everything done at the facility. The healthy insurance portability and accountability law (HIPAA) ensures the strict adherence by healthcare providers in the protection of patient confidentiality and security of the medical records. Failure to enact these measures leads to the facing of stiff federal penalties. Electronic health records are accompanied by in-depth security systems that are inbuilt meant to restrict unauthorized access to patient’s medical records. They utilize networks firewalls, biometrics and passwords that protects unauthorized access to the records of patients. The use of this method ensures that auditors can be able to monitor if there was authorized access to the records since they keep records of employees who accessed records.

Data supporting electronic health records.

The healthcare industry remains at the threshold of enacting revolutionary changes in the dynamically changing wold. The EHR technologies strand to ensure that the healthcare industry is transformed for the better. In the United States, the health information technology for economic and clinical health (HITECH) act of 2009 contributed greatly to the adoption and meaningful use (MU) of EHRs (Analgen and Wellman, 2018). Today, in the state, more than 95% of health care facilities possess at least one EHR. The EHR data is crucial for the improvement of patient care by granting the providers with access to tools of evidence that will aid in the decision making and the facilitation of clinical practices by the automation and streamlining of the provider workflow.

By the year 2015, many hospitals facilities employed the use of electronic clinical data that is employed in the centres internal operations that seek to inform the clinical practices. By 2017, the ration of facilities that employed the use of the EHR increased to 94% with the most common uses of the technology being the provision of a continuous quality improvement processes, the monitoring of the safety of the patients, assessment of the degree of adherence to the centres guidelines and the identification and ratification of the care gaps for the diverse segment of patient populations (Hu et.al, 2020). The use of clinical data however, varies form one facility to the others with the characteristics being attributed to interoperability. Hospitals that are perceived to engage in interoperability domains that actively find, send, provide summary and receive of the health care records, depicting a high degree of dependency on the EHR. The trend towards the use and dependency of the electrical health records is likely to rise with the adoption of the 21st century cures act implementation. For instance, the health facilities adoption of the 2015 edition of the health IT criteria that stresses on the updating of technical requirements in order to effectively facilitate greater interoperability.

Healthcare settings

An EHR is a real time, patient record that instantly avail information on prompt to authorised persons in a digital version. A health care setting refers to any place from which a per4son can receive health care. The use of EHRs is prevalent in the United States in acute care health facilities to long term care facilities (Sheerer et.al, 2016). Examples of such facilities are nursing homes and skilled nursing centres, outpatient health centres, home health care and physician offices.

Conclusion

Based on the analysis, the future of the technologies is bright. When majority of the health facilities have the EHRs installed, the sharing of data will lead to improved health care to patients though the collection and analysis of data. This implies that the health care services data will be efficiently mined, bridging and bringing about new opportunities to lower the costs and improve the quality of the healthcare. Many healthcare professionals concur that the data mining of healthcare records could be employed in the prediction of potential patients who may develop chronic illnesses. Moreover, the government could be able to collect the information and contract and compare the most effective treatments and use it to develop the best remedies in the treatment of diseases and conditions. Therefore, the comprehension of the dynamics of how hospitals are currently using their electronic health records data is paramount to institute policy initiatives that ensure that performance and the management of the population health though EHR data is enhanced in healthcare facilities.

References

Yadav, P., Steinbach, M., Kumar, V., & Simon, G. (2018). Mining Electronic Health Records (EHRs) a Survey. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 50(6), 1-40.

Chen, I. Y., Agrawal, M., Horng, S., & Sontag, D. (2020). Robustly Extracting Medical Knowledge from EHRs: A Case Study of Learning a Health Knowledge Graph. In Pac Symp Biocomput (pp. 19-30).

Cruz, N., Serrano, M., Lopez, A., Medrano, I. H., Lozano, J., & Coll, B. (2019). P581 Electronic health records (EHRs) data validation in atherosclerotic/cardiovascular clinical phenotypes. European Heart Journal, 40(Supplement_1), ehz747-0191.

Sherer, S. A., Meyerhoefer, C. D., & Peng, L. (2016). Applying institutional theory to the adoption of electronic health records in the US. Information & Management, 53(5), 570-580.

Hu, X., Qu, H., Houser, S. H., Chen, H., Zhou, J., & Yu, M. (2020). Hospital Characteristics Associated with Certified EHR Adoption among US Psychiatric Hospitals. Risk Management and Healthcare Policy, 13, 295.

VanLangen, K., & Wellman, G. (2018). Trends in electronic health record usage among US colleges of pharmacy. Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning, 10(5), 566-570.