Question

Which of the following is not
a challenge in implementing electronic health records?

Question 9 options:

	1) Cost
	2) Government incentives
	3) Physician resistance
	4) Complexity of the systems

Answer 1

An Electronic Health Record, more commonly called as EHR in the healthcare world, refers to the storage of a patient’s information in a digital format. These patient-centred records are available anytime for authorized users, thus easing the clinical workflow. The healthcare team has real-time access to the entire medical history of the patients including the diagnosis details, the treatment plans and aftercare, allergies to medications, lab test results, and more.

Government incentives are not a challenge in implementing electronic health records because while the rest of the factors actually pose a challenge to implementing electronic health record, government incentives promote their implementation. Cost and system complexity are definite roadblocks in moving to an electronic record system. Several organizations are constrained by them. Additionally, many physicians might not be comfortable with using technology, leading to them resisting such a move. But the government provides an incentive to the concerned organization to ease the migration. Thus, government incentive is an enabler supporting the move.

Implementation of EHR in a healthcare system is not as easy as it sounds. There are numerous potential challenges in implementing an electronic health records system.

Other barriers that have been identified are technical issues, system interoperability, concerns about privacy and confidentiality, lack of health information data standards, lack of a well-trained clinician informatics workforce to lead the process, the number of vendors in the marketplace, and the transience of vendors.

Despite of the potential benefits of electronic health records, implement of this technology facing with barriers and restrictions, which the most of these are; cost constraints, technical limitations, standardization limits, attitudinal constraints-behaviour of individuals, and organizational constraints. Many studies indicate that the more important factor than other limitations to implement the EHR are resistance to change.

List of major challenges that one should be aware of while implementing EHR.

· Cost of Implementation.

· Staff Resistance.

· Training is time-consuming.

· Lack of usability.

· Data Migration.

· Limitation of Technical Resources.

· Interoperability.

· Lack of Proper Planning.

· Lack of communication.