2ND MOD POST. Response to Darrius. Management Essay

RESPOND TO BOTH POST, USED TITLE I ADDED, 135 WORDS EACH POST MUST HAVE A CITED SOURCE
Darrius POST #1
Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) is changing how the healthcare industry operates and has already began to reduce waste and help improve health outcomes. A major component of HIT is the Electronic Health Record (Kruse, Stein, Thomas, & Kaur, 2014). EHRs can improve public and population outcomes within the healthcare organization. This can be achieved by efficiently collecting data in a form that can be shared across multiple organizations and leveraged for quality improvement and prevention activities.
EHRs have the potential to influence population health data metrics across the health care organization. The definition of population health at its core is to identify the health outcomes of a group of individuals and the distribution of health equity within those populations. As has been mentioned, the effective implementation of EHRs across the healthcare ecosystem would improve overall population health goals by utilizing the features that allow for the organization of large amounts of patient information (Kruse et al., 2014).
EHRs have unlimited potential within the health care organization, although multiple barriers exist within the system that exist to cripple functionality within the EHR. First, EHR products are often expensive and can require a major investment throughout the healthcare ecosystem. Next, some EHR applications are not standardized which could prove problematic to those population health efforts. For example, the standardization of EHR applications could provide a digital doorway that can be utilized to submit electronic syndromic surveillance data to public health agencies. As a result, the meaningful use of system applications could leverage the benefits of the EHR to improve public and population health.
JULIE POST #2
Electronic health records (EHRs) were implemented to serve patients more effectively, to help physicians and health care professionals to provide quality care, and to reduce costs and provide timely service to patients. EHRs allow for patient records to be kept electronically and reduce waste of manpower and time of filing paper medical records. EHRs allow for healthcare professionals to easily share patient files by providing medical records immediately through electronic technology. This is an extremely beneficial feature of the system as it can be extremely beneficial to patient outcomes in emergency situations where patients require immediate treatment. Healthcare professionals in these situations would have access to patient history, any patient allergies, any chronic conditions, previous surgeries, medications that patients may be on, as well as other beneficial patient information.
EHR systems also have alerts built in the system as a safeguard. This will serve as a flag that notifies healthcare professionals when a patient may be on a medication that may have adverse effects if paired with other medications they may be prescribing, it may notify physicians of high risk clinical needs, or behavioral needs patients may have (Indiana Health Service, n.d.). However, there can be risks involving patient safety with the overuse of alerts in the system itself.
EHR alert fatigue is where there are numerous alerts that clinicians are casually glancing at and overriding the alert (Patient Safety Network, September 2019). This can cause patient alerts to be disregarded when the information could be crucial when providing patient care. This can cause legal issues for the healthcare professionals, cause harm to healthcare staff, and could negatively impact the patient’s health outcome. The overall design of EHR systems was intended for positive impacts in the healthcare industry however, poor design of EHR systems and improper use can cause errors that jeopardize the integrity of the patient data in the EHR, leading to errors that endanger the patient’s safety and decrease the quality of care delivered by healthcare professionals (Bowman, 2013). Not only can this happen, healthcare professionals can also cause human errors in patient files. Documenting in the wrong patient’s file can also harm patient outcomes. It is important to thoroughly review documentation prior to saving and exiting patient files.