Question

What benefits of EHR and what impact will it have on safe, quality care of healthcare professionals

Answer 1

EHRs and the ability to exchange health information electronically can help you provide higher quality and safer care for patients while creating tangible enhancements for your organization. EHRs help providers better manage care for patients and provide better health care by:

• Providing accurate, up-to-date, and complete information about patients at the point of care
• Enabling quick access to patient records for more coordinated, efficient care
• Securely sharing electronic information with patients and other clinicians
• Helping providers more effectively diagnose patients, reduce medical errors, and provide safer care
• Improving patient and provider interaction and communication, as well as health care convenience
• Enabling safer, more reliable prescribing
• Helping promote legible, complete documentation and accurate, streamlined coding and billing
• Enhancing privacy and security of patient data
• Helping providers improve productivity and work-life balance
• Enabling providers to improve efficiency and meet their business goals
• Reducing costs through decreased paperwork, improved safety, reduced duplication of testing, and improved health.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are the first step to transformed health care. The benefits of electronic health records include:

• Better health care by improving all aspects of patient care, including safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, communication, education, timeliness, efficiency, and equity.
• Better health by encouraging healthier lifestyles in the entire population, including increased physical activity, better nutrition, avoidance of behavioral risks, and wider use of preventative care.
• Improved efficiencies and lower health care costs by promoting preventative medicine and improved coordination of health care services, as well as by reducing waste and redundant tests.
• Better clinical decision making by integrating patient information from multiple sources.

The use of EHR can improve the quality of healthcare, increasing time efficiency and guideline adherence and reducing medication errors and ADEs.

Consequently, EHR can determine also a reduction of costs associated with medical errors, ADEs and time inefficiency. In effect, several studies focused on the economics of medical errors and ADEs  point out that considerable cost reductions are achievable through improving quality of care and reducing harm to patients.

Through EHR, high-quality care is provided to avoid stressful situations that patients have to address on a usual basis. EHR technology would allow administrative staff to monitor the health of patients virtually during encounters with physicians, lab technicians, and insurance staff