Electronic Health Records: Annotated Bibliography

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The following literature review explores five published peer reviewed articles, in addition to official government letters sent from the Obama administration and credible nursing textbooks, which all discuss the importance of the EHR and the impact that the adoption of the electronic charting system has on nursing and health care. As a nursing student who attends clinical at Jackson Memorial, a community based hospital that just switched to an electronic charting system; I have heard the daily complaints about electronic health records and its effect on the ability of the nurse to provide timely and efficient patient care. This paper examines the pressure for transformation of the nation’s…show more content…
Bush announced that “all Americans will have an electronic medical record within 10 years” (Higgs, n.d.). The president believed that by switching to electronic based health records; providers and hospitals can avoid harmful medical errors, improve patient care, and lower costs. Since that speech, the United States government has been adamant on implementing this change by investing billions of dollars searching for a national electronic based records system. In 2009, President Barack Obama re-enforced George W. Bush’s State of the Union address by proclaiming that the government will continue this push towards an electronic charting system by 2014. This was the reason the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) aka the “stimulus bill” was passed. The bill promised to provide monetary incentives to any hospital system that converted from paper based medical records to an EHR system. Some of the benefits that this bill emphasized were improved patient care, accessible patient data, more time with patients, improved patient communications and collaboration, and the advancement of scientific research (Higgs,…show more content…
This believe was the reason that the Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) initiative was implemented in 2004 by nursing and informatics leaders whose main objectives were to respond to the challenge presented by President George W. Bush in his 2004 state of the union address. Kunz (2010) discussed some major advantages that have been and can be seen when adopting the electronic health record system. She stated that an EMR helps improve the accuracy of documentation because it helps limit duplicate and transcription errors. For instance, in a paper based system documentation can be entered in more than one place and thus leave room for inaccuracies, but when documentation is entered in an EHR one time the information can be spread to wherever the data is required by authorized personnel. Furthermore an EMR reduces transcription errors because everything is typed up and thus legible. This ease of access helps improve the continuity of care because all the authorized health providers are able to review the information
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