The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion
The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion
Usability of Electronic health records refers to the level of efficiency and effectiveness achieved by a user for the purpose of executing certain roles. A system characterized with quality usability therefore guarantees ease of performing certain roles. The ease at which user interfaces are to interact is therefore attributed to usability of a system. Health informatics on the hand involves utilization of computer and information science in the field of healthcare. Some of the applications of health informatics include mhealth, telemedicine, elearning tools, data warehousing and health information systems among others (Kumar et al., 2018)The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion.
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Electronic health record refers to a collection of patient and population data that is electronically stored in a systematic digital format. Electronic health record is therefore an advancement of paper work such as patient’s medical history and progress notes among other patient’s health information. Electronic health records contain information concerning the age, health history, gender, medicines, allergy, results from lab tests, immunization status, billing information and instructions concerning discharge. Unlike the traditional medical record where paper work is used, electronic health records facilitate a confidential sharing of patient’s information between healthcare providers and the patients (Agniel, Kohane & Weber, 2018)The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion.
For example, if one physician puts a patient under a certain medication, other physicians within the same healthcare facility will also get to know. The common traditional medical records that hinder instant sharing of information include soap notes, admission notes, post-operative notes, pre-operative notes, post-partum notes and procedure notes among others. The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion
The usability of any given design rely on how the user’s needs are well addressed by the quality of the design’s features. The user is therefore solely responsible for the usability of their design. There are various key features of consideration that a user should always observe. The first element is effectiveness. It is the extent at which the user successfully completes their desired task. It is therefore an important element that determines whether the user shall complete an action correctly or not. Efficiency is the second element. In regards to this, efficiency refers to the ways through which the user can successfully complete a task within the shortest time possible (Kumar et al., 2018). Engagement is the other essential element that determines whether the user appropriately finds the usability good for their topic of interest. Error tolerance is the other essential element. It is an element that only offers support to a given number of errors and it only shows, the errors that the user made in genuine situations. This can only be recovered through number of errors determination, determining the severity and types of the common errors made by the user and the possible strategies that the user can utilize to overcome these errors (Shickel et al., 2017)The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion. Finally, the ease of learning for new users is the last significant element. In relation to data usability, new users can easily accomplish their goals at first time as well as more goals in future. Observing these key elements ensures that data integrity is highly observed since unintentional data changes are not made from the time of entry to the time of retrieval.
The design of health IT has continued gaining improvements from application of human factors and heuristic principles. Most of the impact made from these improvements is mainly offered in patient outcomes and care processes. The roles of health information technology implementers and designers requires a thorough future research which would help to further incorporate the engineering of human factors in the processes of designing information technology. It is through this science of human factors that all these interactions such as human-computer interactions related to the uses of electronic health records are evaluated (Carayon et al., 2020)The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion. User experience and usability are two interdependent terms that are used in electronic health record description. Their interdependence is portrayed since EMR is paramount in communication improvement while the EHR enhances patient care coordination. Human factors therefore help to design equipment and jobs that best suit people.
There are various activities that can be done to the EHR with an aim of improving clinical efficiency. The first one is Information overload reduction in the physician’s notes. The health IT tools that boost usability should also be adopted for improvement. PDMP data should also be integrated to electronic health record systems to ease the process of retrieval. Healthcare organizations and facilities should also consider adopting specialized clinical workflows to help in improving EHR. Finally, involving all the nurse informaticists in the processes of EHR optimization would play an important role. There are various reasons why I would recommend such improvement measures on electronic health records. The first one is that healthcare providers gain access to accurate patients’ health information thereby making the patients to acquire the best medical care. According to Shickel et al (2017)The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion, The EHR also enhances improvement of diseases diagnoses while at the same time reducing chances of medical error occurrence thus improving patient outcomes. Through the use of EHR, workflows in a clinical setting is also enhanced in areas such as management of records, coding and analysis of charts that helps in improvement of usability in IT applications.
References
Agniel, D., Kohane, I. S., & Weber, G. M. (2018). Biases in electronic health record data due to
processes within the healthcare system: retrospective observational study. Bmj, 361.
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k1479
Carayon, P., Hoonakker, P., Hundt, A. S., Salwei, M., Wiegmann, D., Brown, R. L., … &
Patterson, B. (2020). Application of human factors to improve usability of clinical The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion
decision support for diagnostic decision-making: a scenario-based simulation study. BMJ
quality & safety, 29(4), 329-340. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2019-009857
Kumar, M., Gotz, D., Nutley, T., & Smith, J. B. (2018). Research gaps in routine health
information system design barriers to data quality and use in low‐and middle‐income
countries: A literature review. The International journal of health planning and
management, 33(1), e1-e9. https://doi.org/10.1002/hpm.2447 The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion
Shickel, B., Tighe, P. J., Bihorac, A., & Rashidi, P. (2017). Deep EHR: a survey of recent
advances in deep learning techniques for electronic health record (EHR) analysis. IEEE
journal of biomedical and health informatics, 22(5), 1589-1604.
https://DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2017.2767063
The purpose of this assignment is to explain the principles of design usability and analyze the impact of human factors on electronic applications for health care systems.
Write a 750-1,000-word paper on the usability of health informatics applications. Include the following:
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Describe an example of an electronic health record (EHR) application used in a health care setting.
Describe the key elements of design usability for that application by reducing data errors and improving data integrity.
Compare human factors and heuristic principles and discuss how they affect the chosen EHR application.
Recommend an improvement to the chosen electronic application.
Provide a rationale for the suggested improvement based on knowledge of design usability. The Usability Of Electronic Health Records Discussion