Electronic Health Records: Actual Experiences

Electronic Health Records: Actual Experiences

Article one: Electronic Health Record (EHR) Implementation in Community Nursing Homes

Three Key Points:

1. Most of health information technology system implementation has been centralized in bigger hospital care and medical practices and all the community nursing homes has been lagging behind in information and communication technology(ICT). Existing way of transfer of information from nursing homes to hospital & consultant or vice versa was not efficient and it was time to introduce EHR into the nursing homes.

2. Introducing EHR into hospitals and nursing home is a long, costly and complicated process which took a lot of planning, equipments, trainings & supports. Considerable co-operation from management & staff from all sites involved is also required for successful implementation as of numerous changes were to be brought into the system.

3. The implementation of EHR by Boston University Geriatrics department into Boston medical services and 11 of the community nursing homes was a successful project. It implies, numerous unrelated and diverse health care facilities can be brought under one EHR system significantly improving patient care.

Article two: Implementation and Use of an Electronic Health Record within the Indian Health Service

Three Key Points:

This article points out the different view of the clinicians on the implementation of EHR within Indian Health Services.

1. Almost all clinicians attended training once and almost half of the clinicians attended the EHR training twice indicates that clinicians had positive attitude towards implementing EHR.

2. There were few downside of EHR to clinicians like, decreased the quality of patient-doctor interaction, also decreased time for interaction with patients, computer technical and clinical issues and system limitations etc.

3. Majority of the clinicians, 78% used EHR on every patients visits makes it a successful transition even 5% of the clinicians...