ADVANCED INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
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Advanced Information Management and the Application of Technology
One of the key features of an electronic health record (EHR) is that healthcare information can
be created, managed, and shared by authorized providers in real time.
EHR systems are essential in
today's healthcare organizations.
Hospitals need to assess which EHR system will work best for their size
and needs of their facility.
The EHR should be secure, have productivity and help improve quality
assurance initiatives.
These systems can be used to share patient’s past medical history, prior
hospitalizations, doctor notes, current medications, allergies, laboratory results, radiology results, vital
signs and other vital information regarding patients.
This, in turn, helps assist providers to make
informed clinical decisions quicker so patients receive the care they need.
This real-time information can
be crucial and even life-saving.
Advantages and Disadvantages
I will now discuss and provide key details about the advantages and disadvantages of a health
information system (HIS), including an accurate description of usability, interoperability, scalability, and
compatibility.
Usability is a term used to refer to the ease of navigating your EHR systems by its users.
For Nurses, an advantage to charting with this system is the built-in assessment for documentation, built-
in nursing notes for specific events, such as a Rapid Response note, or a Critical Value report.
This saves
nurses valuable time charting and creates more time for nurses to be at the patient’s bedside.
A
disadvantage of the usability of a system would be a system that is not user-friendly.
Navigating a
patient’s encounter can be difficult and very time consuming if you are not familiar with the system.
It
requires numerous clicks and drop-down boxes, with limited choices.
If the assessment doesn’t fall into
within normal limits (WNL), the nurses must manually type in their finding, which takes time.
EMR’s can
be an effective tool for users who take the time to become highly familiar with it.
