In a recent report conducted by KLAS, several discoveries were made including some critical information on the important of Electronic Health Record (EHR) speed. The survey, which was carried out by 270 healthcare entities and nearly 300,000 healthcare employees, focuses on the speed ad reliability of EHR and the resulting impact on clinician’s overall satisfaction with the system.
Importance of an Electronic Health Record (EHR)
An EHR is an electronic record of a medical patient that is stored electronically by healthcare providers. The record contains key medical information belonging to the patient including medical history and active or discontinued prescriptions.
Findings of the KLAS survey
Of the clinicians interviewed, approximately forty four percent reported that they are unsatisfied with the speed of EHR. This is concerning, considering over half of clinicians are of the opinion that a reliable EHR is imperative to the safety of their patients. A direct correlation was found between those who agreed EHR enabled the safety of patient, and those who believe their EHR system is reliable. Those unsatisfied with their experience have reported that the system is far too slow, and even displays irrelevant alerts that hinder the performance of the healthcare experts, employed in the clinician. In contrast to this, healthcare entities that had a high number of clinicians stating there are satisfied with their EHR’s speed and reliability were likely to report that they were also satisfied overall with the experience using the records. Those were reported that their EHR system did not experience a lot of downtime (when records are unavailable to some degree), still reported issues due to several other variables involved in the functionality of EHRs. These include the quality care involved, the initial and continuous training of employees, and the delivery of vendors.
It has been found that clinicians that report they are not fully satisfied with their EHR’s also suffer on a broader level from a lack of technological development in their locations. Those who are not satisfied are over 50% more likely to declare they also suffer from hardware problems.
