Hello, and welcome to this course. We are going to be talking about an introduction to electronic health records, or EHRs. In this lecture, we're going to cover the background of EHRs, and also what are some of the benefits and common EHRs that are out there? When you think about an electronic health record, what exactly are we talking about? It's pretty simple. We're looking at an electronic record of health information on an individual. Because we can see things from demographic data such as name, address, and date of birth. But we can also look at hospital encounters or when that person went to an outpatient visit, which makes a great from an interoperability perspective and it also conforms to national standards. It's created, managed, and really consulted by licensed clinicians as well as staff members. One of the really great things about utilizing an electronic health record is that not only can you handle patient care, but you can also use it from a billing and compliance perspective, communication-wise, and you can also use it from a research and reporting perspective as well, which makes them very powerful tools. When we think about that, we have to ask the question, well, why was there a need to have EHRs in the first place? If you've gone to a doctor's office and you look and you see a file full of paper charts, there are a lot of limitations on paper records. You have them, but they're not exactly easy to share. There can also be a lot of inefficiencies related to having paper records. There are sometimes a lot of issues with legibility, but then you also have issues or challenges when it comes to billing and compliance and even sharing that information. Not to mention, when you think about auditing those records, to have to pull a stack of hundreds of charts to review over time can be really difficult. The biggest thing out of all of this is that it can also introduce a lot of patient safety issues. As a result of that, there have been a lot of different EHRs that have been in development. Many of them have been in their infancy, but it's been in the last, I would say four or so decades. True adoption, however, didn't really start to take place until the government introduced reimbursement programs for hospitals and providers to use EHRs. That's really where the HITECH Act of 2009 came into play. This was meant to provide improvements standards, so to speak, to help providers from a privacy and safety perspective as well. It really and truly sought to improve data collection as well as reporting, and also just pushing for new technology. The benefits of using an electronic health record are, there's a plethora of it really, and there are financial savings, there's an ability to really and truly share and integrate data. There is an improvement in care coordination. You can graph and track results, and it's really a big improvement from a quality and safety perspective. Even when you look at the image in this particular slide, this is a clinical decision support tool that helps a provider when they're working with the patient to say, "Hey, I have been a person that's been a smoker," for example. If that's been documented, the provider will get a warning to say, "Hey, this patient is a smoker. Maybe we should think about implementing ways to help that person to stop smoking." That's just one of the features of having an EHR, but you have computerized physician order entry. You have the ability to have your lab and imaging studies integrated into the system. You can do referral management, clinical decision support, as I just mentioned. There are so many really cool things that you can utilize in this way. Also, e-Prescribing, or let's say if I'm at the doctor and I want to be able to go to a certain pharmacy, my doctor has the ability to enter that pharmacy in so that I don't have to worry about taking a physical sheet of paper to the pharmacy. It just goes there for me. Evenly, you think about that communication that I mentioned earlier, there secure patient messaging. I don't have to worry about, if I send my doctor this message, will they get it, will they not get it, will they be safe? How will that work? It's simple. There are many ways that we can build in this information and protect the privacy of the patient and the privacy of the provider in transit sending those messages. Then we can also work on patient education. Rather than having multiple sheets of paper, we also have the ability to pull up that information in the chart itself. Lastly, one of the really good things about having an EHR is that you can also access it from home or from a smart device or a smartphone. Let's also talk about some of the common electronic health records. Two of the biggest vendors that are out there are Cerner and Epic. But we also have Meditech. We have Allscripts, Athenahealth, as well as eClinicalWorks amongst others. I really want to recap what we discussed in this lecture. We went through electronic health records, the benefits of them. We also talked about some features of electronic health records. But then we also talked about the benefits of how that can really assist individuals when they access those health records. With that, I'll see you in the next lecture.
