Risks Benefits and Barriers of EHR Systems: A Comparative Study Based on Size of Hospital

This is a review of Thakkar and Davis article, Risks, Barriers, and Benefits of HER Systems: A comparative study based on size of Hospital.

Introduction

The author of this article wanted to examine the rise of EHRs in health care today. The general subject of the article is the implementation of EHRs in hospitals, and the risk, barriers, and benefits that comes with EHR’s

Methods

The researchers conducted interviews at three hospitals within a 65-mile radius of their Midwestern University. Researchers interviewed seven health care workers and seven HIT workers from particular hospitals. The survey focused on the health Information Technology workers. Individual surveys were sent out to 1000 randomly selected hospitals for the directors of health information management. Each of the survey asked for feedback on what their particular hospital was doing as far as EHR implementation.

Results

The results revealed that the largest number of people that responded to the survey revealed that they already used some sort of EHR system in their facility. The rest of the people that responded indicated that they used some components of an EHR system. Another part of the results reveal that the two major barriers that responders felt were the biggest risk of EHR systems were the privacy of data and inaccurate patient information due to the lack of real time system updates. The participants of the program felt that the two benefits coming from the HER system was interoperability with other departments and the improvement of quality of care. Finally, cost was considered a factor in this article. The study discovered that as the hospital increased in size, the opinion of the EHR being too expensive to implemented decrease.

Discussion

Hospitals are now feeling the pressure to implement EHRs into their facilities more aggressively these days. Understanding how each hospital is handling the transition is vital to get a better understanding on what benefits and barriers that these hospitals are facing as they transition. Hospitals vary in size, shape, number of staff, and funding so it good to get a comparison of the issues each facility faces to discover ways to solve these issues.