EHR Burden: What is it and is there anything being done about it?
So what is EHR Burden?
His examples include:
What can be affected by the EHR Burden?
Lack of Patient Care
Longer Hours
QA Citations
How is the EHR Burden Being Handled?
Lucky for nurses, the burden of EHR’s is becoming more voiced. So much so that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report that addresses the EHR burden.
HHS identifies three goals:
These goals seem reasonable to be both an improvement for nurses and patient care alike.
- Reduce the effort and time to record data while seeing patients
- Reduce effort and time meet requirements set by governing bodies
- Improve functionality and ease of use
Key Areas of focus: For each goal, the HHS identifies four key areas that need focus.
- Clinical Documentation
- Ease Usability
- Federal EHR reporting requirements
- Public Health Reporting (Including Controlled Substances)
Requirements: Each initiative must meet three requirements.
- Achievable in about 3-5 years
- Implemented through existing or easily expanded authority
- Include actions that improve patient care and overall experience for clinical documentation
The Strategy behind the Key Areas:
The strategy is broken down into three recommendations that include:
SMART Goal Assessment
In this report, the goals are missing two of these aspects “specific” and “measurable”. The report doesn’t delve into HOW they are going to standardize medication information or HOW they will measure that it has succeeded. But ultimately, whether they are SMART goals or not isn’t the question.
Ultimately is there anything being done to reduce EHR burden and is it helping or hurting nurses?
There is a plan in place, but until there are actual changes that make it to the frontlines, it would be hard to argue that there is any help. And of course, if there is no help, there is hurt.
Hopefully, some of these strategies get put into place soon because some nurses are really feeling the burden.
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