Week 4 Discussion
Describe the Electronical Medical Record system that is used on your clinical practice site.
- What are the Pros and cons you have found?
- Is E-prescription incorporated on the EMH?
- Does it have adaptive learning?
- Does it have an Incorporated patient doorway?
- Is there Flexibility with the absence of internet connectivity?
- Does it have effective documentation and Image management capability?
Support and share your personal experience so all of us can learn.
With the growth of technology comes different approaches to compiling and storing patients’ medical records. The EMR technology gives health care providers information in formats that were not possible with paper charts. Primary care providers can now view and print graphs of values such as weight, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure, tracking changes over time. The EMR technology gives health care providers information in formats that were not possible with paper charts. Primary care providers can now view and print graphs of values such as weight, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure, tracking changes over time. The EMR improves the attainment of chronic disease management, prevention, and screening targets, as shown in studies that demonstrated improved quality measures. Electronic medical records can provide treatment goals or alerts to remind providers when certain prevention and screening maneuvers are due or out of date (Manca 2015).
Electronic medical records improve quality of care, patient outcomes, and safety through imp reduction of medication errors, reduction in unnecessary investigations, and improved communication and interactions among primary care providers, patients, and other providers involved in care.
My preceptor has Harris Care Tracker as his electronic medical record (EMR). He has used many different types of electronic medical records and he says that Harris is very user-friendly. I find it fairly easy to navigate. I feel like there are a lot of redundancies in the charting system, however, that seems to be the case in every EMR that I have seen. It does have E-prescription incorporated and is easy to deploy. Sometimes the e-prescription does not go through, and it is hard to figure out why. Harris does not seem to have adaptive learning and it does not have an incorporated patient doorway that we utilize. The internet has not gone down since I have been there. However, the power has gone out and the whole system goes down but saves whatever the practitioner was working on at the time. The blood test results can be uploaded directly from Quest, which is the lab that we use for the patients’ blood tests. Imaging results can be scanned and uploaded into the chart. When we need to retrieve a test result or imaging result it is right at our fingertips. The Harrison tracker makes it easy to review past test results, past visit notes, and past prescriptions. It is easy to refill prescriptions by signing into a patient’s chart.
There are inherent drawbacks to EMR systems. Eye contact is important to patients when communicating with health care providers. When Nurse Practitioners turn away from a patient to use the EMR patients can feel ignored, creating a barrier to communication (Balestra, 2017). It is important for the practitioner to focus on the patient, make eye contact and practice empathetic listening.
References:
Balestra, M. (2017, February 1). February 01, 2017 PDF [282 KB] Save Share Reprints Request Electronic Health Records: Patient Care and Ethical and Legal Implications for Nurse Practitioners. NP Journal. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://www.npjournal.org/article/S1555-4155(16)30510-4/fulltext.
Manca D. P. (2015). Do electronic medical records improve quality of care? Yes. Canadian family physician Medecin de famille canadien, 61(10), 846–851.
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