Free Essay Describin the Impact of Electronic Health Records in the Healthcare Industry

The use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in the American Healthcare industry has been promoted for a long time. The use of EHRs has come with significant impacts including improving patient outcomes. Apart from collecting, storing and transmitting information, a proper EHR system helps leverage the data, so it works for the patient's benefit. EHRs provide interoperability which has made it easy to get relevant data that is beneficial in patient care. EHRs have also improved public health outcomes (AHRQ, 2018). The use of these systems makes it easy to collect and analyze information that concerns the entire population.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

It is thus easy to notice patterns and trends which makes it easy for the necessary authorities to move in fast and offer proper solutions. Care delivery has also significantly improved since practitioners do not waste a lot of time recording and retrieving patient information. Increased automation has made it easy to view patient data from various mobile devices and remote locations (Zeng, 2016). Thus it is faster for them to know what the patient needs and to swing effectively into action.

The speed of most of the automation processes, including data retrieval, is increasingly improving which gives practitioners a lot of face time with their patients. EHRs have also made mobile health possible today (Zeng, 2016). Thanks to the digitization of records and technologies such as cloud computing, it is possible to access and send medical information from remote locations. As such, a practitioner can a patient's lab report from a tablet from the lab technician in a short time (Zeng, 2016). The use of EHRs has also shifted the focus of the industry from volume to value. It has been possible to understand the needs of the different stakeholders which means that it should be easy for them to determine how to serve the different sociodemographics that exist.

The purpose of the paper is to find out what are the impacts that the use of electronic health records has brought to the industry. The information will be gotten from the analysis of documents which are concerned with the use of EHRs in particular institutions (AHRQ, 2018). Since the systems have been in use for a significant amount of time now, the information is readily available and can be found from reliable sources. Government websites such as The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will also help to verify the mentioned benefits.

The reason that EHRs have become so utilized in healthcare is that they have been the primary agenda of influential entities such as the government and non-profit organizations. Today these systems are widely used in the healthcare system, and it is thus necessary to see how essential they have become (Gellert, Webster, Gillean, Melnick, & Kanzaria, 2017). There is significant published literature that tackles the topic as it is since it has been a subject of concern ever since it was introduced to the industry long ago. It is also a subject that continually changes with time thanks to technological advancements and more realized benefits and is always of interest.

Analyzing the impacts that these technologies have on healthcare makes is important because it shows what is working and what should be changed. For instance, it is after assessing the impacts of standalone systems for individual institutions that they will know the need for an integrated one (Gellert et al., 2017). By looking at the impacts of technology in healthcare, both intended and unintended, it is also possible to leverage them so that they can be used for beneficial purposes. For instance, the free time created by the automated processes can be used to enhance the care of delivery to patients.

References

AHRQ. (2018, September 6). Electronic Medical Record Systems. Retrieved from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: https://healthit.ahrq.gov/key-topics/electronic-medical-record-systems

Gellert, G. A., Webster, S. L., Gillean, J. A., Melnick, E. R., & Kanzaria, H. K. (2017). Should US doctors embrace electronic health records? British Medical Journal, 1-3. Doi: 10.1136/bmj.j242

Zeng, X. (2016). The Impacts of Electronic Health Record Implementation on the Health Care Workforce. NC Medical Journal , 77(2), 112-114. Doi: 10.18043/ncm.77.2.112