This week we are going to look at electronic health records and reflect on their to our job as future FNPs and their importance to our patients. Electronic Health Records (EHR)...how does it improve patient safety? How does it improve quality of care? What are they and why are they so crucial to modern-day healthcare?
An EHR is the systematized collection of patient and population electronically stored health information in a digital format (Tapuria et al., 2021). Providing patients with access to EHRs can decrease these costs, improve self-care and quality of care, and improve health and patient-centered outcomes (Tapuria et al., 2021).
EHRs help patients to be more informed about their healthcare, and when patients are well informed, they tend to be more engaged in their health management and willing to work with their providers. Having patients actively use EHRs such as myChart in our health system allows them to be in communication with their healthcare team, ask questions, review test results and medications, see upcoming procedures, and actively view their current treatment plans. When patients are well-informed and have access to their information, they are more likely to be satisfied with their care (Tapuria et al., 2021). The U.S. government's MyHealthEData initiative has made citizen access to their health records a top priority, as have private companies, like Apple and Google, which can store patients’ records on their phones (Tapuria et al., 2021). By focusing on the accessibility of EHR, patient involvement in their care increases, patient outcomes improve, and their satisfaction with their care team increases as well. With high patient involvement in their treatment, there also tends to be a lower healthcare cost for patients because they are more likely to treat the conditions they have, are more likely to follow their treatment plan, and have a higher rate of medication adherence (Tapuria et al., 2021).
In the United States, there has been a significant investment in the adoption and use of Health Information Technologies (HIT) by providing over 35 billion dollars of support through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act passed in 2009 (Trout et al., 2022). According to Alder (2025), the five main goals of the HITECH ACT are to:
Improve quality, safety, and efficiency
Engage patients in their care
Increase coordination of care
Improve the health status of the population, and
Ensure privacy and security
HITECH ACT has allowed patients to be more involved in their healthcare and has allowed providers to offer better care for their patients by coordinating care, working with other providers, having increased communication with patients, and building a stronger provider-patient relationship (Alder, 2025). Since 2011, Medicare and Medicaid have had EHR incentive programs that promote meaningful use of EHRs by providers and healthcare organizations to promote better patient outcomes and foster a community of safety (Trout et al., 2022).
Another area of assistance that EHR is working towards bettering is that of patient harm reduction, increasing safety and using reporting tools to improve patient care. While some evidence shows that EHRs are still lacking in some of the fundamentals that support improving patient safety, other studies have shown the EHRs are demonstrating a sustained improvement of reporting events and improving patient outcomes (Upadhyay & Hu, 2022). Data from EHR can also be used in predictive analytic software which allows providers to see gage possible negative outcomes for patients with chronic illnesses, demonstrate positive trends, and predict future trends (Upadhyay & Hu, 2022).
As future FNPs, we already use EHRs in our daily work as nurses and see the benefits in how important they are for improving patient care. Once we begin working as providers, I can how EHRs will allow for better communication with patients, better communication with other providers and members of patients' care team, improved care coordination, improved patient engagement, better diagnostic results, and an improvement in overall patient outcomes. By having patient information stored and accessible at the click of a button, we as future providers, can gather patient information quicker, even if it is from outside our healthcare system, see results, communicate with other team members, and work together to provide better diagnosis, more current treatment plans and engage our patients in their care. If we can encourage patients to follow their care plans, comply with medication adherence, and witness prescription refills by using EHR we can also help save our patients time and money by treating their conditions sooner and hopefully reduce hospitalizations and complications.
References
Alder, S. (2025). What is the HITECH Act? The HIPAA Journal. https://www.hipaajournal.com/what-is-the-hitech-act/
Tapuria, A., Porat, T., Kalra, D., Dsouza, G., Xiaohui, S., & Curcin, V. (2021). Impact of patient access to their electronic health record: systematic review. Informatics for Health and Social Care, 46(2), 194–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/17538157.2021.1879810
Trout, K. E., Chen, L.-W., Wilson, F. A., Tak, H. J., & Palm, D. (2022). The Impact of Meaningful Use and Electronic Health Records on Hospital Patient Safety. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(19), 12525. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912525
Upadhyay, S., & Hu, H. (2022). A qualitative analysis of the impact of electronic health records (EHR) on healthcare quality and safety: Clinicians’ lived experiences. Health Services Insights, 15(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1177/11786329211070722
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