Medical Care Changes and EHRs
Although electronic health records have brought in many benefits to the healthcare industry and helped deliver a better quality health service to millions of patients, EHRs have many challenges. In a complex, dynamic, and continuously changing healthcare system, new health laws are introduced and many changes in medical care are made, keeping it up with all those changes is considered a challenge for EHRs which will need updates and software changes or modifications with any change in medical care. The inability of EHRs to accommodate changes in the medical care such as new insurance …show more content…
Another pro is the ability to access and share health records regardless of the time or location. In addition, the facility using EHR system will be able to provide a better quality service to its patients with the meaningful use of EHR system in which patients are more engaged in the care process and that would be supported with the incentives provided by the federal government. (Narisi, 2013). On the other hand, there are many cons for using the EHR system, those include the high cost associated with adopting a new system, reduction in productivity can be also noticed when the staff are not used to the new system and tend to spend longer time figuring out the optimal way to use it or in the case of system crash, another major concern with the EHR system related to the information safety and privacy that should be …show more content…
Hence, it is very important to select the right EHR system for every practice based on cost-benefit analysis. (Medical Records, n.d).
One of the major factors contributing to the resistance or hesitance provider organizations have towards EHR adoption is the lack of clear Return On Investment (ROI). Using cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the costs and benefits of adopting an EHR system would help professionals make financial decisions through estimating the value of benefits and the costs of the new project. Therefore, the cost-benefit analysis is used to find out when the adoption of HER system can bring net profit to the healthcare organization. (Wang & Biedermann, 2010.
Although the facility that chooses to adopt EHR system will have to deal with a lot costs at the beginning of the project, the return of benefits will be seen on the long run as higher productivity, greater efficiency, increased revenue stream and net