EMR/EHR

Recently, the healthcare sector has shown a growing interest in information technologies. Two popular health IT (HIT) products are the electronic health record (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) networks. The introduction of these tools is believed to improve care, but has also raised some important questions and legal and privacy issues. The implementation of these systems has not gone smoothly, and still faces some considerable barriers. This article reviews EHR and HIE to address these obstacles, and analyzes the current state of development and adoption in various countries around the world...

Implementing electronic health records (EHR) in healthcare settings incurs challenges, none more important than maintaining efficiency and safety during rollout. This report quantifies the impact of offloading low-acuity visits to an alternative care site from the emergency department (ED) during EHR implementation. In addition, the report evaluated the effect of EHR implementation on overall patient length of stay (LOS), time to medical provider, and provider productivity during implementation of the EHR. Overall LOS and time to doctor increased during EHR implementation...