What Is Electronic Health Records?

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Recommended: The EHR system allows the health care providers to save and retrieve patient’s data, promoting improvement in clinical, organizational, and societal outcomes

The Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and strategic ways patients can be engaged in their health decision-making

Abstract-This paper aimed to inform the readers to provide the concept of health information technology, mainly concentrated on electronic health records (EHR) and how it benefits overall quality of health services. Even though EHRs are widely accepted and have been adopted increasingly, patient engagement still lower than the average expected. Reasons are discussed why patient engagement has been low while the adoption of EHRs increases. The paper draws some research findings and provides examples to illustrate how patient disengagement affect the quality of care. It also discusses what appreciable tasks have done among …show more content…

If health information technology has been adopted widely, there would be more than $81 billion annually save in the United States only (Gee & Newman, 2013). Despite the vast improvement of health information technology in the current century when compared to the past, there still some challenges in adopting the technology. For example, patients and healthcare providers’ frustration with the current system, and a high cost of the information technology can be mentioned. However, healthcare organizations are thoroughly delivering care, access the patients’ health data, run their analysis for better health outcomes, and gain opportunities to better quality improvement through many electronic health delivery systems (Health information technology, n.d.; Wager, Lee, & Glaser, …show more content…

EHRs are “a real-time, patient-centered” records that make health information available promptly and bring any patients’ health information together in one place such as medical history, medications, diagnosis, laboratory test results, immunization records, allergies and even medical images, and many others. The use of electronic health records (EHRs) continuously increases. An ability to collect secure patient data electronically, and supplies the information to the providers upon a request is one of the features in EHR. The system can also bring together information from more than one health care organization and any past and current clinical services of the patient that helps the health care professionals in providing quality services. Within this scope, EHR benefits health care providers to enter orders directly into a computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system, provides tools in decision making like, alerts, reminders, and provides access to the new research findings and evidence-based guidelines (Wager, Lee, & Glaser, 2013, pp. 134-37). The United States is creating large investments to boost the adoption and use of interoperable electronic health records (EHRs)

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