The process and outcome benefits of HIT that are important and unique to pediatrics should be better quantified, given the unique workflow and information needs of pediatric organizations and practice settings. A growing number of epidemiological studies have shown the frequency of medication errors in pediatric health care. Well-designed studies are needed to empirically demonstrate the benefit of HIT in improving patient safety not only in the hospital setting, but also in outpatient and other settings. A small set of high-quality studies show that the implementation of comprehensive outpatient EHR improves the quality of care. The available evidence focuses primarily on the impact of outpatient EHRs on declining overutilized health services by improving access to data, providing opportunities for real-time analysis of clinical data, and acting as decision support platforms. First, in order to fully assess the quality of care, there must be links between structure and process and outcomes.
Examples of structural quality are the number of beds in a hospital, the number of doctors in the emergency department per shift, the budget for a clinic and the presence of a diabetes disease management program. Examples include breast cancer screening, ordering laboratory tests, and prescribing a drug. They are the consequences of health services or can logically be attributed to the act of providing those services. While the structure relates to the environment in which health care is provided and the process involves care arrangements, the outcomes are events that occur in patients and consumers, such as individuals, groups, or populations.
The overall impact of a technology on healthcare costs is much broader than that and can include compensatory savings and induced costs. The direct cost of a technology incorporated into capital includes not only the cost of the capital itself, but also the operating costs required to implement it. The operating costs of even the most capital-intensive technologies can be higher than expected due to the need for operational and supervisory staff, training, insurance, supplies and space.
The main factor in the rising costs was the increase in the use of support services, such as laboratory tests and X-rays. Fineberg and others have also pointed to the high cost of clinical chemistry testing and other low-cost technologies. Scitovsky found that from 1971 to 1981, the rise in the cost of support services slowed, but several new and expensive technologies significantly increased costs. Showstack et al. also found evidence that high-end items, such as intensive care unit management of the seriously ill, caused large increases in the 1970s. Evidence is scarce for the ability of HIT systems to make healthcare more patient-centered.
In addition, EHRs streamline the traditional recording process, which can sometimes seem exaggerated for relatively small medical needs. EHRs also reduce errors by making up-to-date patient information directly accessible to all networked healthcare providers. More research is needed on the efficacy and effectiveness of EHRs in healthcare facilities, healthcare providers and patient populations. Such research requires a focus on how EHR tools are implemented and used in day-to-day practice, an expansion of institutions with non-academic/non-integrated networking practices, the development of methods and tools aimed at evaluating externally developed systems, and a broader understanding of human factor issues relevant to healthcare. The authors divided the benefits into capture and access, decision support, clinical practice optimization, business management, and streamlining patient flow. Adjusted for total implementation and system costs, the trust factor assigned to authors, and the discount rate of 9.5 percent, equity was forecast at $24.9 million.
This information is rationally filtered and presented to the healthcare provider at appropriate times, with the intention of improving the healthcare provider’s decision-making. It is able to provide evidence-based standards and guidance; procedures and protocols; rules and recommendations for care, etc. Miller and colleagues showed that the CDS system reduces serious medication errors by 55% and total medication errors by 83%, highlighting the transcendent power of such a system to help healthcare providers in their diagnosis. According to the Office of the National Health Information Technology Coordinator, the implementation of electronic records reduces the time it takes to evaluate false victims by 20 percent, reducing patients’ length of stay in those cases. Similarly, the National Center for Policy Analysis reports that facilities that use HIT systems reduce the average stay of patients from 5.7 days to 5.5 days. This effectiveness has led researchers to investigate other benefits of using electronic medical records and HIT, such as whether telemonitoring can slow nursing home admissions in elderly patients.
Current procurement practice, which focuses on aggregating historical buying patterns and lowering prices, promotes inertia and removes incentives for innovation in the NHS or industry. Ultimately, this acts as an additional brake on service reform and discriminates against patients in the UK by acting as a powerful force for maintaining old and outdated clinical practices. The most obvious benefit of digitization is the conversion of manual medical records into electronic medical records. This has made it easier for patients to share their medical records with new doctors and for doctors to work with readable, up-to-date patient information.
There is no reason to expect every surgeon and hospital to provide equivalent care in the same way that doctors and patients can expect a standard dose of a pharmaceutical product to have equivalent potency. The greatest quality and HIT gains occur when suppliers are paid through a system of capitated rates. Under such a system, any investment that lowers the total cost of care for these patients can be recouped, so it is worth reducing unnecessary services and providing care in the clinical trials most efficient environment. Such reasoning underlies the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) decision to develop its HIT system. Most published examples of high-quality cost-saving projects come from health maintenance organizations, for example, better care for diabetes or heart failure that keeps patients out of the hospital. Also for HMOs, high quality can compensate for other undesirable characteristics, such as poor access or facilities, or it can justify higher premiums.
Charts were also available for telephone contacts, and the resulting improvement in clinical workflow led to a more effective use of telephone care, with doctors reporting that they were better able to address patients’ health issues over the phone when accessing electronic records. The authors cite this result as a primary reason for the decrease in office visits, one of the main outcomes of the study. The purpose of this review is to investigate and synthesize the available research evidence for the impact of EHR on the quality of care in the outpatient setting. The evaluation will also seek to distinguish the direct impact of EHRs as point-of-care and workflow tools from how EHRs have been used to indirectly achieve those results, measuring clinical and process outcomes. We have chosen to focus on outpatient care because of the large volume of health services in this area.
This access also allows you to communicate directly and securely with your healthcare provider. Each of them can prescribe different medications, and sometimes these drugs can interact in harmful ways. EHRs can alert their health care providers if they’re trying to prescribe a drug that could cause that kind of interaction. An EHR can also alert one of your doctors if another doctor has already prescribed a medication that didn’t work for you, saving you the risks and costs of taking ineffective medications. We have presented evidence that new technologies increase costs on average, but that some technologies in some clinical applications can save more resources than they cost. We have also suggested that profitability is an appropriate criterion to guide the introduction of new technologies, although other criteria, such as fairness for disadvantaged people, should also be considered.
Tags: benefits, healthcare, technology