Pros And Cons To Ehr Essay

With EHR, there’s are bigger risk for security breaches and information exposure when using computer systems that require the internet to access patients’ medical records. HITECH and HIPAA, were created to control the number of computer threats. EHR, is a secure software, that healthcare personnel use to document patients’ medical and personal information in. This system contains piece of personal information from a patient’s name to each surgery this person has had in their life time.

As useful as the EMR is to patient care there exist a few drawbacks when records are transformed from paper into the digital form. Even though patient health records can only be accessed from inside the hospital’s computers, the EMR can be accessed from anywhere inside the hospital or from another hospital or clinic within the same organization. Before the implementation of the EMR, healthcare staff had to go directly to the patient 's physical chart and thumb through pages of information. Now, with the EMR, any hospital employee can access any patient 's information anywhere inside the hospital. EMRs are more easily accessible, even to personnel not involved in the

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the electronic health record mandate. Who started it and when? I will discuss the goals of the mandate. I will discussion will how the Affordable Care Act ties into the mandate of Electronic Health Record. It will describe my own facility’s EHR and what steps are been taken to implement it. I will describe the term “meaningful use,” and it will discuss possible threats to patient confidentiality and the what’s being done by my facility to prevent Health Information and Portability Accountability Act or HIPAA violations.

Use of an EHR presents major opportunities for the compromise of patient’s personal health information (PHI). The facility must ensure proper safe guards are implemented and functioning properly at all times. Employees need to be educated on the safety measures to prevent breach of patient confidential health records. Privacy breaches can result from misuse or improper storage of PHI by the healthcare professional, by third party payers, or by lack of proper encryption in the EHR system itself (Burkhardt & Nathaniel, 2014). The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a law that holds healthcare facilities and professionals accountable for keeping PHI confidential, patients to control

EHR was created to have a technical way to securely exchange private and personal medical health information in hopes to improve the quality of care, decrease medical errors, limiting paper use, reduction of health care cost, and increasing a person access to affordable health care. A mandate was created for EHR stating that health records can be accessible to all facilities with patients having the capability to access their own health records at any time. Ameliorating the quality and convenience of care given to a patient, allow for cost saving measures, engage the patient and family to participate in their care, improve accuracy of medical diagnosis, and enhance the efficiency of the overall outcome of the patients’ health.

A lengthy list of EHR benefits supports the evolution from paper to electronic medical record keeping. One such benefit, the significant reduction of needed storage space. Bulky paper charts require a lot of space and misplaced charts waste time and effort to locate. Since EHR data remains on the computer, medical practices no longer require secure on-site storage, and electronic files eliminate misplacing files. Another benefit to data remaining on the computer rather than a medical chart, electronic records allow immediate access from several locations. EHRs provide emergency room personnel access to allergies and other pertinent information of unconscious patients. The on-call physician accesses patient information from their home computer, rather than driving to the medical

Today, the patient will visit the same doctor and the doctor will enter the data into a tablet or pc. The EHR is a designed very similar to the paper chart, but is programmed to collect and segregate the information in different formats to transmit securely to the necessary partners. Those partners include insurance carriers, public health entities, clearinghouses, laboratories, and pharmacist. This data is collected and stored on secure servers. In most EHR’s today, a doctor who has a private practice, and maybe affiliated with a hospital has the ability to allow the hospital to access a patient’s record, if that patient has agreed to release their information to the hospitals. So if the patient is taken to the local hospital, the hospital can have access to the patient’s records if an authorization is in place. The EHR will not only collect the patient medical information, it will track the medical information. Providers are required to secure the information and track the medical records activity via a built-in audit system that will show the medical records history and the name of all parties that access the patient’s records. Poor EHR system design and improper use can cause EHR-related errors that jeopardize the integrity of the information in the EHR, leading to errors that endanger patient safety or decrease the quality of care. These unintended consequences also may increase fraud and abuse and can have

Contrary to the benefits, critics have suggested that the use of EHRs worry people will have to endure more privacy breaches and that utilizing the EHRS will be cumbersome for physicians especially if the physicians are using the EHR in the room with a patient (Knooper, 2008). To elaborate on the negative aspect of using the EHR, a Luddite who does not want to embrace technology feels that using an EHR will only cause him/her to miss diagnostic clues if he/she does not take a person’s medical history by hand with pen or paper which could potentially lead to a misdiagnosis (Knooper, 2008). Some physicians claim that using an EHR while in the room with

Health care agencies invest large sums of capital into EMR and in addition, rely upon reimbursement from the Health IT system (for example Medicare and Medicaid). According to Hurdle et al., (2007), the American Medical Informatics Association [AMIA] Code of Ethics, “patients have the right to know about the existence of electronic records containing personal biomedical data” (p. 391). In addition a patient has the right to expect that “biomedical data are maintained in a safe, reliable, secure, and confidential environment that is consistent with applicable law, local policies, and accepted informatics processing standards” (p. 392).

Prior to the Information Age, medical records were all stored in folders in secure filing cabinets at doctor’s offices, hospitals, or health departments. The information within the folders was confidential, and shared solely amongst the patient and physician. Today these files are fragmented across multiple treatment sites due to the branching out of specialty centers such as urgent care centers, magnetic resonance imaging, outpatient surgical centers, and other diagnostic centers. Today’s ability to store medical records electronically has made it possible to easily send these files from one location to another. However, the same technology which can unify the fragmented pieces of a patient’s medical record has the ability to also create

An Electronic Health Record is a computerized form of a patient’s medical chart. These records allow information to be readily available to authorized providers during a patient’s encounter with the healthcare system. These systems do not only contain medical histories, current medications and insurance information, they also track patients’ diagnoses, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images and lab tests/results (source). The fundamental aspect of EHRs is that they are able to share a patient’s information quickly across service lines and even between different healthcare organizations. Information is at the fingertips of lab techs, primary care physicians, pharmacies, clinics, etc. The

After decades of paper based medical records, a new type of record keeping has surfaced - the Electronic Health Record (EHR). EHR is an electronic or digital format concept of an individual’s past and present medical history. It is the principle storage place for data and information about the health care services provided to an individual patient. It is maintained by a provider over time and capable of being shared across different healthcare settings by network-connected information systems. Such records may include key administrative and clinical data relevant to that persons care under a particular provider. Examples of such records may include: demographics, physician notes, problems or injuries, medications and allergies, vital

Electronic health records (EHR’s) have many advantages, but there are plenty of disadvantages. EHR’s were created to manage the many aspects of healthcare information. Medical professionals use them daily and most would feel lost without it. Healthcare organizations were encouraged to adopt EHR’s in 2009 due to the fact that a bill passed known as The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act). “The HITECH Act outlines criteria to achieve “meaningful use” of certified electronic records. These criteria must be met in order for providers to receive financial incentives to promote adoption of EHRs as an integral part of their daily practice”, (Conrad, Hanson, Hasenau & Stocker-Schneider, 2012).

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are now exercising a more significant impact on healthcare practices than ever before. The United States healthcare system stands on the brink of a new age of electronic health information technology. The potential for innovation within this new technology represents a great opportunity for the future of medicine. However, in seeking to implement EMRs caution must be exercised to ensure that implementation does not have adverse effects on the personal nature of the patient-physician relationship an important issue that must be addressed in order preserve the integrity of healthcare in the new electronic age.

The electronic health record (EHR) is a digital record of a patient’s health history that may be made up of records from many locations and/or sources, such as hospitals, providers, clinics, and public health agencies. The EHR is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and has built-in safeguards to assure patient health information confidentiality and security. (Huston, 2013)