Question

Research recent (within the last 5 years) Electronic Health Records (EHR) implementation issues by searching online or within the Rasmussen library. Discuss at least 2 issues identified, such as healthcare providers’ issues (physicians, nurses, and other users). Explain the challenges. How could these be mitigated? What do you think should be done? Reflect from your own experiences if you have encountered challenges, either professionally or as a patient, with EHR.

Answer 1

The electronic health records are identified as the efficient method of managing the health records in the hospital sectors. Even though this could benefit the hospitals and health care organizations to effectively manage the health records, it may pose many challenges in is implementations. Some of the challenges in the implementation of the electronic health records are mentioned below

• Technical ability: For using the electronic health care system and its effective implementation, the doctors, nurses etc should possess relevant knowledge and expertise in handling and managing the system. This lack of knowledge can pose a challenge for them as well as for the effectiveness of the organization. This can also reduce their confidence level, motivational level, etc.
• Privacy issues: The issues related to privacy can put the health care organization as well as the operators like the doctors and nurses into a critical challenge. This challenge can make them to get hesitated to manage and maintain the EHR

Maintaining the health records of the patients are highly important. Any compromise in this can pose severe legal and ethical challenge for the health care organization and the service providers. For example, a nurse with lack of knowledge in handling the electronic health care system can wrongly enter the health care details which can impact the patient’s treatment. Hence in order to avoid such challenges, the health care organizations should provide sufficient training and development to the employees. This can help them to gather knowledge and also will make them motivated. The training and development can also reduce the privacy related issues.