A Culture of Safety Health, Medicine, Nursing Research Paper

Electronic Health Records as a Culture of Safety 
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Abstract
Electronic Health Records (EHR) are used in healthcare systems to improve patient safety as well as aiding physicians in effecting quality healthcare to patients. EHR encompasses a wide range of patient information such as diagnosis results, vital signs, laboratory data, medications, and demographics, which can be retrieved by physicians to help make health care more accessible to patients. In general, EHR not only refers to the mere digitalization of the medical data of patients but rather, it is designed to optimize the quality of care offered to patients. The system has also helped patients to be in control of their data. However, the adoption of EHR can disrupt workflows in the first few months, and it is expensive since it requires the institutions to buy and pay for the installation of hardware and software, train their employees, pay for maintenance, and constantly update the data. More so, digital information greatly attracts hackers who might want to sell the information to interested parties for quick cash. Nonetheless, the efficiency and effectiveness of EHR have proven that the system is much more useful than disadvantageous.
Keywords: Electronic Health Record, EHR, Quality Healthcare
A Culture of Safety
Patient safety has been an important priority for healthcare providers for a long time. Errors associated with patient identification are one of the most severe global healthcare quality issues for patient safety. Every healthcare unit strives to ensure that the right patient gains access to the treatment that is rightfully theirs. Because of the risks that are brought about by mismatch and wrongful identification of patients, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has highly prioritized patient identification as one of their Patient Safety Goals since 2003 (Joint Commission, 2017). All care settings routinely carry out patient identification activities to match patients to their intended treatment (ACSQHC, 2018). Failure to accurately match patients to the components of their care regardless of whether the components are diagnostic, supportive or therapeutic, can pose a great risk to the safety of the patient. In the entire healthcare, lack of proper patient identification and wrongfully matching patients to clinical interventions result in wrong site procedures, diagnostic tests, transfusion errors, and medication transfusion.
By acknowledging the fact that patient identification is posing a great risk to patient safety, a wide range of strategies has been proposed to help improve the safety of patients. The majority of these proposals rely heavily on the use of technology. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are an example of how information technology has been useful in improving patient safety. EHRs have been widely adopted over the past ten years in both outpatient and inpatient settings. The EHR system comprises of an electronic patient chart and functionality for medical device interface, imaging and laboratory reporting, and computerized provider order entry. Essentially, the EHR system establishes an enduring, comprehensive, seamless, and legible record of the patient’s treatment and medical history (Patient Safety Network, 2018). Every step in the patient’s experience is beginning from the identification, analyzing, diagnosis and testing need to incorporate identification verification, which should have two patient identifiers. The identifiers are required to be matchless and should not relate to the patient’s location.
Adopted Healthcare Technology
The effectiveness of EHRs has led to its wide adoption in healthcare. In 2009, the United States joined other nations in widely adopting the technology (Payne, 2015). The goal of many national initiatives is to improve patient safety, and this is achievable by using electronic data. Such data is useful in managing, detecting, and learning events of patient safety in near real-time (Sittig, & Singh, 2012). EHRs are patient medical history in a digital version that organizes clinical information in real time to improve the quality of healthcare. The American Medical Information Association together with the Congress have both acknowledged that EHRs are greatly capable of contributing to the future of personalized healthcare (Meade, 2015).
Personalized healthcare is an all-embracing health care framework that links engaged patients with predictive technologies with the aim of coordinating care to prevent diseases and promote health. The extensive implementation of EHR assists doctors in keeping track of advances in the field of medicine, patient prescriptions, and use of proper treatments. Moreover, EHRs can offer a means of tracking a patient’s health outcomes and help medical personnel to identify the treatments that are most effective to improve the quality of care.
An important feature of Electronic Health Records is their ability to allow health data to be established and handled by the legal providers in an electronic setup and then share the data with other providers from other institutions of health. EHRs are designed to share information with other health care institutions and providers like specialists, facilities for medical imaging, workplace clinics, and emergency facilities. This means that the EHR database can contain a patient’s information from different healthcare givers.
Successful implementation of EHR consists of two phases, which include; pre-implementation and implementation. The pre-implementation phase involves establishing a procedure for governing as well as a project plan. The institution also needs to communicate with the staff and patients involved, redesign the institution’s workflow, and offer training and education (HealthIt, 2018). The implementation phase involves tailoring the system to align with the practical requirements, establishing a process for change management, identifying means of back-loading the medical histories of patients, supporting the system, and offering encouragement to staff along the way.
EHR systems exist in a variety of forms. It can also imply a wide variety of digital data systems that are employed in healthcare. EHR is employed in single institutions as an interoperating system, in associated healthcare units, either on a national or local level. However, implementing EHR in hospitals is complex since it requires several technical and organizational factors like culture, human skills, financial resources, and organization structure (Boonstra, Versluis, & Vos, 2014). The implementation of information systems in hospitals can prove to be quite challenging as compared to other organizations, partly because of the issues with data entry, confidentiality, and safety concerns.
Nonetheless, the effective implementation of EHRs can provide a concrete improvement to the quality of healthcare. As indicated in research, patients who are granted access to their electronic medical data easily show health outcomes that are much more desirable. Apart from offering help to physicians, the EHR can also prove its importance to the patients since it offers valuable tools for engaging patients to enable them to improve their skills, abilities, and knowledge on how to self-manage their health.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Electronic Health Records
There are many benefits of adopting EHRs, which prove that its implementation is worth the cost and upfront time. These benefits include
Benefits for Clinicians
An obvious advantage of EHR is its legibility. Illegible handwriting has been a significant contributor to medical errors throughout history as poor handwriting accounts for approximately 60 percent of the medication errors in hospitals (Hoover, 2017).
Further, using an EHR to manage medical prescriptions can help improve the outcome of the patient in the long run. EHR is useful in adverse drug events by roughly 52 percent. While some EHR can also be integrated with barcode scanning technology, such an alert pops up immediately when a nurse scans the wrong medication to alert them of the mistake (Hoover, 2017). Incorporating ...