write up regarding electronic health record

An electronic health record (EHR) is an individual's official health document that is shared
among multiple facilities and agencies. The role of EHRs is becoming increasing influential
as more patient information becomes digital and larger numbers of consumers express a
desire to have mobile access to their health records.

Purposes
This study aims to investigate physicians’ self-assessed competence to document
and to read EHR notes; writing and reading preferences in an EHR; and
demographic characteristics associated with their perceived EHR ability and
preference.

The benefits of EHRs include:

 The ability to automatically share and update information among different offices and
organizations
 More efficient storage and retrieval
 The ability to share multimedia information, such as medical imaging results, between
locations
 The ability to link records to sources of relevant and current research
 Easier standardization of services and patient care
 Provision of decision support systems for healthcare professionals
 Less redundancy of effort
 Potential long-term lower costs to medical systems

The governments of many countries are working to ensure that all citizens have
standardized electronic health records and that all records include the same types of
information. The major barrier for the adoption of electronic health records is cost.

EHR standards

EHR standards are in place to certify that electronics health records fulfill meaningful use -- in other
words, to ensure that EHRs possess necessary technical capabilities and security safeguards.
Another purpose of standards is to help facilitate interoperability. The health IT community has
already created the following interoperability standards:

 Health Level Seven International (HL7), a set of international criteria for transfer of clinical and
administrative data
 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a web-based series of tools that falls under
HL7
 SMART Health IT, an open, standards-based technology platform that enables people to create
applications that can run across a healthcare system, including EHRs
How EHRs improve patient care

EHRs are able to improve patient care in a number of ways.

For example, they can aid in diagnosis by giving providers access to patients' complete health
information, which provides a comprehensive view and helps clinicians diagnose problems sooner.

Furthermore, EHRs can help reduce medical errors, improve patient safety and support better
outcomes. While EHRs do contain and transmit data, they also manipulate patient information in
meaningful ways and provide that information to the provider at the point of care.

Conclusions
Writing and reading EHR documentation is different for physicians. Maximizing
navigation skills can optimize non-linear EHR writing and reading. Pedagogical
questions remain related to how physicians and medical students are able to
retrieve correct information effectively and to understand thought patterns in
collectively lengthier and sometimes fragmented EHR chart notes.