Electronic health records make patient- centered records to be instantly available and secure to authorize users (Beasley& Sinsky, 2014). Being a nurse manager, I had both good and bad experiences in the implementation of the EHRs in my healthcare organization. Implementing the EHRs was my top priority so that it may end up meeting the legal requirements and that of the complete health records (Nguyen et al., 2014). I realized that for effective implementation of EHRs, leadership, training and communication are essential. Consequently, organizations must also be willing to have an effective mechanism for managing change as well as how to delaine in various roles.
On the other hand, it was hard to determine exactly what will motivate staff to be willing and ready to transform from the paper to the electronic health records (Nguyen et al., 2014). This made many practitioners resist change making the implementation process very difficult. Consequently, I also experienced that, implementing the EHRs is quite expensive and it brought a lot of unplanned costs to the organization (Peterson et al., 2013). Some of the important activities such as community health promotion projects had to be forgone to create funds for the implementation process of EHRs.
Despite the availability of the above constraints in the implementation of the electronic health records, there were some positive aspects associated with the process, for instance, the organization started experiencing a decrease in the cost of healthcare as well as better quality of care to the patients (Peterson et al., 2013).To overcome challenges associated with the implantation of the electronic health records, I would suggest that nurses to be adequately trained on the usage of the technology and it is also a high time for healthcare organizations to set adequate funds that can finance the process (Peterson et al., 2013).Most of my colleagues were very excited about the implementation of the technology and also optimistic that the process will eventually make their work easier through improving the patient-nurse relationship.
Conclusively, implementation of the EHRs is not an easy task since it faces resistance from staff who are not ready to embrace change but when these practitioners are adequately trained, they get motivated to adopt the technology.
References
Beasley, J. W., & Sinsky, C. A. (2014). Electronic health records. Annals of internal medicine, 161(9), 680.
Nguyen, L., Bellucci, E., & Nguyen, L. T. (2014). Electronic health records implementation: an evaluation of information system impact and contingency factors. International journal of medical informatics, 83(11), 779-796.
Peterson, J. F., Bowton, E., Field, J. R., Beller, M., Mitchell, J., Schildcrout, J., & Pulley, J. M. (2013). Electronic health record design and implementation for pharmacogenomics: a local perspective. Genetics in Medicine, 15(10), 833-841.
