Infrastructure Evaluation on EMR/EHR and patient portal Medicine Paper

Infrastructure Evaluation on EMR/EHR and patient portal
Name
Institution
Date
Infrastructure Evaluation on EMR/EHR and patient portal Write a paper of 750-1,000 words in which you review the current state of the infrastructure and focus on EMR/EHR and Patient portal: security, data management, connectivity, etc., and make suggestions for future improvements.
Background
The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and Electronic Health Record (EHR) are digital versions of the patient records or reports including information on each patient’s medical and treatment history. Electronic clinical applications are now common in hospitals and health institutions where the aim is to optimize workflow, patient outcomes, minimize costs and improve the quality of care. The advent of the internet and technological innovations have changed the workplace including clinical settings, and there are more medical devices capable of connecting to the internet more an ever before. The EMR/EHR and patient portal facilitate enhance security, data management, connectivity, but failure to use the technology system and ignoring patient engagement are challenges affecting integration of health information technology, but leveraging the new technology will improve patient outcomes.
Current infrastructure, workflow, and processes
The current infrastructure of the electronic health, medical systems and patient portals are standardized and adequate as there is recording of all the patient health activities from the moment they are admitted until they are discharged from the hospital facilities. There is registration of each patient into the system and the health practitioners are expected to use. In cases of external consultation it is possible to view patient records, which can be visualized for previous hospital visits and diagnostic tests conducted. Health institutions and organizations increasingly provide the patient portals platforms so that patients can access their information and there is greater support for transparency when handling patient health information to ensure it is reliable, relevant and accurate (Heart, Ben-Assuli & Shabtai). Health care professionals utilize the technology and system to input patient data, store, identify and retrieve what is relevant, and patient using the patient portals also identify what they seek pertaining to their health conditions and status.
Gaps and issues within the environment
One of the challenges in the clinical environment is that physicians are at times reluctant to using the computer system, and this makes it difficult to adopt EMR/EHR. Reluctance to adopt health information technology affects how both patients and health practitioners rely on these systems. As such, training the health practitioners on using systems will ensure that this becomes part of medical practice. There is no guarantee that health information technology will improve patient outcomes and the quality of care, and if there are gaps in access to information this affects the reliability of the data and information since it some important information may be overlooked (Rathert et al., 2017).
There is also lack of patient engagement, yet this would optimize health outcomes, and even as...