Why EHR Systems Need to Be Ramped up during a Health Emergency EHRs have many benefits and facilitate chart review processes. However, these have to be ramped up during a health emergency such as COVID-19.
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Electronic health record (EHR) systems used in hospitals and other healthcare organizations have to adapt to the changing requirements for patient care triggered by an emergency such as the COVID-19 outbreak. Medical review companies assisting with the review of patients’ medical records point out how the new demands could exert tremendous stress on the existing systems and reveal vulnerable areas that need to be corrected. One of the main concerns is how quickly an EHR system in one provider location can be deployed to an alternative care location. If this is to be done flawlessly, department units will have to be built in the software alongside deploying printers, hardware and testing that everything works as expected, as Dana Bensinger MSN, RN-BC, informatics nurse specialist and client solution executive at consulting firm CTG notes in a computerworld.com post. Why Is This Difficult? What makes this difficult is the fact that alternative locations set up to treat COVID-19 patients may be away from the hospital premises – these may be tents put up in parking lots, conference centers, university dormitories and so on. Lack of connectivity in such locations makes it difficult to install EHR and other systems by the patient’s bedside. EHRs as of now are rather complex, inflexible and lack in interoperability. These will have to be modified or updated to cater to the COVID-19 response. The systems should not obstruct the physicians’ work; they should smoothly and flawlessly integrate with the healthcare organization’s care delivery processes. Apart from ensuring seamless clinical workflow, other features such as registration and billing components must all work well, collecting error-free and complete information. As experts in the field point out, health systems must wake up and test their system features to ensure maximum functionality. With the present EHRs, a physician may spend a lot of time trying to figure out all details of the patient who has come for consultation. This is because the patient information is spread across heads such as medications, diagnosis tests, imaging and so on. Since a clear timeline of the medical data is not available, any vulnerabilities or conditions the patient may have (which could generate an incorrect view of the patient’s risk for COVID-10) could lie unrevealed.
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Interoperability Is Crucial Now that a pandemic is afoot and data is vital for any apt response, interoperability has become crucial and providers must be able to share patient records across a splintered care delivery environment. •
Data from diagnostic tests, total tests administered, positive case locations, treatment results and other datasets must flow freely across the entire healthcare
spectrum
without
compromising
patient
privacy
and
confidentiality. •
Traditional EHRs will have to be integrated with various health systems, virtual visits, wellness centers and so on.
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A cohesive data model for patients must be there in the EHR that will enable providers to have a clear view of the patient’s health condition, treatments provided, and progress.
It’s the Time to Innovate This pandemic is also the time for all organizations in the healthcare and related sectors to review their existing business continuity plans and ensure that all technology is up to date. The supervision and thoroughness on all computer system administration procedures need to be improved and any reforms foreseen for EHRs and other systems must be given top priority. While essential systems must be monitored for excellent performance, any non-essential systems could be shut down. Importantly, systems and data backups must be functioning well. All recent backups should be tested to ensure they can be completely restored. Addressing all the EHR-related and other challenges may not be easy, but the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and EHR vendors have offered guidelines regarding the documentation of patient data related to COVID-19, and providers may be able to improve their ability to exchange information. Moreover, there have been many initiatives undertaken in areas such as virtual visits, telehealth, nationwide interoperability and so on. Various electronic medical record vendors are also ramping up efforts to provide clinicians with tools to
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manage cases, analyze data and evaluate patients remotely. Many EHR systems have been improved that gives users of these systems, such as clinicians, providers of medical review services and other entities more tools and capabilities to handle the crisis.
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