Electronic Health Record: Pros and Cons Within Nursing Practice

📄 Words:	399
📝 Subject:	Health IT
📑 Pages:	1
✍️ Type:	Essay

Pros

Cons

Organizational efficiency:

Instead of significant paperwork that comes with each patient, Electronic Health Record (EHR) allows for improved documentation accuracy, lower risks of malpractice, and easier medication management and tracking of treatment progress.

Cybersecurity and privacy concerns:

EHR systems, especially those without HIPAA compliancy and low levels of cybersecurity measures, are prone to data breaches that can lead to data mismanagement or misappropriation. Extracted sensitive patient information can be used with malicious intent, compromising patient safety.

Lower storage cost and requirements:

Maintaining patient health history in paper form requires ample storage space, an additional layer of physical security, and costs of providing on-demand accessibility. Implementing these processes in the digital format through EHR allows for alleviating operational costs and storage issues.

Upfront investment to implement:

Deploying EHR systems requires significant upfront financial and time investment to update hardware, digitize paper records, ensure HIPAA compliance, enhance cybersecurity, and train employees to use the new system.

Easier transfer of health records:

EHR provides seamless information sharing between healthcare providers within hospital settings, allowing patients to retrieve their medication details and health indicators anytime, anywhere.

Continuous data entry:

EHR systems depend on continuously updating patient records, as gaps in patient data can lead to errors in treatment. One incomplete entry can significantly undermine service quality and patient safety, which makes EHR systems vulnerable to human or system error.

Table 1. Pros and cons of EHR systems.

With healthcare providers adopting EHRs, the successful implementation of health information technology depends on the ability of care managers (nurses) to integrate informally and apply patient data into treatment (Table 1). The ability to apply course knowledge and scholarliness play a crucial role in developing a scholarly nursing practice and maintaining high clinical standards for an advanced practice nurse (APN). A review of 15 studies involving 3,855 nurses showed that research productivity and career development as APN significantly improve with increased research leadership or the ability to independently perform scholarly inquiry (Hafsteinsdóttir et al., 2017). Moreover, the ability to construe subjective values from objective data within clinical and academic settings and apply them in accommodating different patient populations is a cornerstone of evidence-based healthcare practice (Holly et al., 2021). Essentially, scholarliness and the ability to apply learned principles in real-time practice not only inform both the academic and practical skills to deliver quality care to patients but also allows to manage challenging situations strategically.

References

Hafsteinsdóttir, T. B., van der Zwaag, A. M., & Schuurmans, M. J. (2017). Leadership mentoring in nursing research, career development and scholarly productivity: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 75, 21-34.

Holly, C., Salmond, S., & Saimbert, M. (Eds.). (2021). Comprehensive systematic review for advanced practice nursing.

References

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