Over the years, hospitals and doctors' offices take advance of paper medical records. These records are documented by hand and can be hard to read. The records can be easily lost or important information can be over looked. Many places are switching over to a new process called EHRs. This paper will be looking at advantage of using EHRS, cost, barriers, and fraud and how hospitals and doctors office can implement this system.
EHR or electronic health records is a system that stores patient health information. This system records all information such as medical history, medication, allergies, immunizations, test results, lab work up and billing. This information can be pulled up and accessed any time. EHRs are taking the place of paper charting and making it easier for better patient care and quality.
Cost
Today in order to push the adoption of EHRs the President of the United States sighed a stimulus packages that $17 billion dollars to hospitals and doctors to use EHRs. The cost is high because the government wants every hospital and doctors office to change over to the new technology to help with patient care. Just to change over to EHRs can cost up to or more than $40,000 to get new software, installation of the product, training the staff, and having IT staffed in case of a failure.
Barriers
With the implementation of an EHR there are some barriers. Two of the main barriers are malpractice exposures and HIPAA's privacy and security regulations. The concern with malpractice is that if a patient takes a doctor or hospital to court they can use an EHR because everything that is done to a patient must be recorded.
This may be a barrier only to hospitals and doctors however in a situation of malpractice now patients have a better way of using information that is recorded instantly instead of the old practice of charting where it may have been forgotten to input. By using an EHR hospitals and doctors cannot do anything to a patient until the access their records input the patient's id bracelet code. The second barrier is the HIPAA privacy and security standards main barrier is the sharing of patient's medical records between hospitals and medical staff. There are security safeguards in place to help protect this type of information sharing and allowing only medical staff or hospitals full access through secure networks.
Fraud
According to an article from iHealthbeat states, "with the move over to EHRs could raise the fraud in the health care system." Fraud with health care costs in the United States about $100 billion dollars. The top common type of fraud is identity theft. However, identity theft is on a rise due to some many applications that can be done on the internet and the information people put out there on themselves. In order to keep fraud low training must be provided that shows staff how to log in and out of patient records. IT department has recommenced staff change passwords every 30 days and advise when leaving a patient room logging out of a system completely. The government is pushing for more research, security to insure, and guarantee the safety of EHRs once every hospital in the United States merges over to this new technology
Implication
For any hospital or doctors, office to implement an EHR there needs to be a team put together that can review all available data on the EHR system that will be used. Implementing a new system such as EHR takes time, can be complex, and needs hands on training. An important implementation is will the hospital or doctors office go paperless immediately or use paper back up until the hospital or doctors office is can afford to phase out paper back up completely.
Four steps will help guide the team in making the best choice for the hospital or doctors office. The four steps are; product, assessment, IT support and training. There are many products available for EHRs and the team needs to look at why system would be best for a hospital or doctors office. Once the team picks a product that will best suit, the team needs to assess the product chosen if it has all the vital data needed for er visits, new visits, and follow up visits. Once the product has been reviewed and purchased getting IT, help to run the program and have a help desk available 24/7. The IT support needs to make sure the program follows the HIPAA guidelines and fraud protection for patients. Training on the system needs to be done for all hospital staff and doctors offices. Doctors offices can train easier due to smaller facilities where as hospitals will need to spread out training programs. Once this is all completed, the hospital or doctors office will be able to use EHRs and bring focus back on patient care than updating record keeping with paper.
Conclusion
By having facilities across the nation take advantage of EHRs will help bring patient care back as the main focus. By using paper charting too many doctors and hospitals staff is taken away from patient care to fill out paper work or fix errors on paper work. EHR help with bringing patient care back as a focus because the doctor or hospital staff can scan information quickly and depending on the program that was chosen can just point and click and the information fills in automatically. With the help of the new health care bill, hospitals can get a stimulus to transfer all records from paper over to electronic. Some of barriers may be a concern for doctor's offices and hospitals however the government is working hard on safeguarding information with HIPAA and IT departments that monitor all networks.
By having a team that will research and pick the best product out there, implementing an EHR will be a smooth and effortless by following the basic steps. EHRs take away the long hours of charting by offering a simpler easier way of storing patient's records with an online program and can be accessed through a computer and makes visits faster than ever before.
