NURBN1005 Introduction to Research & Evidence-Based Practice - Esssay Task Assignment Help

Should the digital health record be implemented for all patients?

Better treatment and more customer-oriented services are what today healthcare organisations are aiming at (AHIMA, 2011). To provide better services, quality of care is the need of the hour which requires high-quality information at the right time (Sittig, and Singh, 2011). Paper-based records have certain limitations and hence, fails to provide the required data at the time of need. Health information systems therefore becomes of utmost important providing the health history of a patient at any point of time (Gartee, 2007). This will not only make medical information of patients easily available but also the format of health records will change, thus changing healthcare. This essay evaluates whether digital health record is an important aspect and shall be implemented for all patients or not.  

Seymour et al. (2012) defines Electronic Health Records (EHR) as an electronic version of healthcare records of patients which gathers, creates and stores information of patients’ health electronically. The information system collects information from birth to death which are certified and can be shared by different healthcare providers. Various forms like voice recognition, barcodes, order sets, images and documentation templates are used to feed data (Iv et al., 2011). EHR thus helps in improving the quality of care by improving clinical documentation, healthcare utilization tracking and healthcare efficiencies. Moreover, billing and coding, better safety, lower healthcare and portability of health records becomes easy (Seymour et al., 2012; Valdes et al., 2004). 

The need for EHR cannot be ignored. Gartee (2017) states the importance of health safety that can be derived through the proper use of EHR. Only in USA every year till 2010, lakh people die in hospital because of medical errors. This is because of the fragmented and decentralized nature of the healthcare delivery system. Moreover, patients seeing multiple providers who did not had complete information access tend to take wrong decisions. Additionally, health costs for employers were increasing due to absence of proper order entry system in ambulatory settings (Gartee, 2017). Apart from this, the changing society and living patterns have made the paper medical records outdated. The society is increasingly becoming mobile, people relocated and patients change doctors frequently. Moreover, not a single doctor provides the full healthcare service to a patient. Hence different specialists and testing facilities should be shared (Gartee, 2017).