The Use of Electronic Health Record in Hospitals

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Assignment
Title: The use of Electronic Health Records in Hospitals
    
Introduction
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 significantly increased the meaningful use and adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in US Hospitals. As of 2017, more than 94% hospitals have electronic health records (1). The EHR data is successfully used to monitor the safety of patients (81%), facilitate the improvements in quality (82%) and assess the performance of organizations (77%) (2).
A. The Problem
Majority of the hospitals use EHR for supporting the patient engagement and performance measurement functions. However, it is not taking place across all the healthcare Organisations. The use of EHR in advanced functions lags behind in many critical access hospitals in US (1). It is found that rural, small, state government, local, critical access and non teaching hospitals have lowest rate of EHR adoption (1). The main barriers to the implementation may be high maintenance cost, inadequate IT staff, and insufficient capital to purchase and the resistance from physicians (1). The hospitals which use the electronic health records in sending, receiving, finding and integrating the external data are twice more likely to use their EHR data compared to hospitals which do not engage into the interoperability domains.
The for-profit hospitals observed a greatest increase in use of EHR data from 3.5 to 7.2 measures in 2015 to 2017 respectively (2). However, the rural hospitals managed by state and local government showed no change (2).
B. The Question
“What can be done to increase the use of EHR in advanced functions in Critical Access Hospitals and rural hospitals across US?”
C. The Evidence / Theory
The 2016, ONC Data Brief No.36 reports that the small, critical access and rural hospitals continue to exhibit low basic rates for adoption of EHR (4). In 2015, the rural and small hospitals increased the basic EHR adoption rate by 14% and the critical access hospitals increased by 18% compared to 2014(4).
Source: (4)
The study by (5) reports that the rural hospitals increasingly perceive the barriers (like reporting cost and achieving the staff cooperation) to adoption of health information Technology than the urban hospitals. Small size hospitals face greater cost related barriers compared to bigger ones. Implementation of electronic health records across the patient portals also involves closely working with the developers in designing system and integrating them with the clinical reporting.
The EHRs help the doctors in assessing the patient needs for the referral treatments. They also prevent the inappropriate prescriptions and medical errors while promoting the best practices.
Source (6)
EHRs support the clinical decisions in both the small and large size hospitals. EHRs enable automatic tracking of medications. However, their use in different domains varies significantly. The general hospitals show an increased use of EHRs in warnings about drug dosage, reminders about schedule of exam and test, clinical guidelines for practice, documentation and review of drug utilization (6).
HITECH Act grants more than $30 billion every year to encourage...