EHRs: Losing the Nuances of Nursing Care, and the Value

Image by mcmurryjulie from Pixabay

Our December issue is out, but before we move on from the November issue I want to highlight the Viewpoint, “Advocating for HIT That Captures Nursing Process.” It’s about something that greatly affects nurses’ work, seems to be the bane of all clinicians, and, I think, often prevents individualized patient-centered care.

I’m referring to the electronic health record (EHR), a system built to capture data important for billing and tracking aggregate patient outcomes—but arguably not designed for what clinicians deem as most important for understanding and documenting patient care.

Dylan Stein and colleagues Jasmine Travers and Jacqueline Merrill write what most nurses know about EHRs:

“The nuances of our care get lost in task-oriented, quantitative drop-down menus and checkboxes, while the qualitative value of our interventions and impressions are not encoded in a useful way.”

Nursing notes devalued.

In the old days BC (before computers), clinicians used some checklists for charting but also relied heavily on narrative notes to describe the patient’s individual story. While there are areas one can add notes in an EHR, nurses tell me that it’s not very easy to do so and that no one really reads them because […]

2019-12-05T12:03:16-05:00December 5th, 2019|digital health, Technology|2 Comments
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Nurses vs. Computers: Predicting Risk of Patient Harm

Not All Signs of Potential Harm Are Quantifiable

From chego101, via Flickr

Hospital nurses have many, many responsibilities and tasks, but one of the most important is to ensure patient safety by assessing patients for changes that can signal worsening of a condition or a new potential harm. Creating special units like ICUs, recovery rooms, and step-down units; flags on charts; various alarmed monitors; and safety huddles are a few of the ways hospitals have tried to identify potential problems. Now we have computerized tools to do this—or do we?

The complaint I have heard most from nurses about the electronic health record (EHR) is its inability to capture all the nuances of patient care or various patient problems, especially those that don’t involve easily quantifiable measures like heart rate or lab values. (For more detail, read our November 2016 report on nurses’ concerns with EHRs.)

One cannot accurately use a check mark to convey certain patient behavioral parameters or the “can’t put my finger on it but something’s going on with this patient” assessment that experienced nurses often make. In the April issue of AJN, we published an important study that investigates just this issue: “Identifying Hospitalized Patients at Risk for Harm: A Comparison of Nurse Perceptions vs. Electronic Risk Assessment Tool Scores”

Deciding […]

2017-04-19T10:43:15-04:00April 19th, 2017|Nursing, nursing research, patient safety|1 Comment
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Do EHRs Rob Nurses of Voice and Oversimplify Description of Patient Care?

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN, writes a monthly post for this blog and works as an infusion nurse in outpatient oncology. Editor’s note: this post has been slightly revised for clarity since its initial publication a day ago.

Heroines of Nursing, mixed media collage by julianna paradisi, 2013. Text by Florence Nightingale
Heroines of Nursing, mixed media collage by julianna paradisi, 2013. Text by Florence Nightingale

Previously I’ve written that I have a new employer. Part of this transition is relearning how to use the electronic health record (EHR). Fortunately, this new employer uses the same program as my last. However, that version was EHR-lite compared to the one we use now.

For instance, the new system contains an abundance of “smart phrases” that are used to lessen time spent writing nursing notes. If you are unfamiliar with smart phrases, an uncomplicated explanation is that they are preconstructed phrases chosen from those commonly found in charting, such as “The patient arrived ambulatory for IV infusion.” Instead of typing in this phrase, nurses can click on it from a computer screen menu, and voilà! The entire phrase is electronically inserted into the notes.

Smart phrases, like charting by […]

2016-11-21T13:06:30-05:00September 23rd, 2013|digital health, nursing perspective|7 Comments
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ECRI Conference Notes: Creating and Replicating ‘Systemness’ within Health Care Delivery

By Joyce Pulcini, PhD, RN, FAAN, Policy and Politics contributing editor, AJN

The ECRI Institute’s 19th annual conference (November 28–29) looked at system-level innovation and quality in the health care system. It brought together experts from many fields, including medicine, nursing, hospital or health system administration, informatics, health care quality, policy makers, journalists, and academics. ECRI Institute is an independent, nonprofit organization that researches the best approaches to improving the safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness of patient care. The goals of the conference were to address the following:

  1. What is “systemness”?
  2. Which elements within mature health care systems result in the best clinical outcomes?
  3. Are approaches taken by long-established systems transferable to smaller, newer, or less integrated systems?
  4. Are financial incentives enough to drive change?
  5. How can electronic health records (EHRs) help improve “systemness”?
  6. Do transformation units within health care systems produce results?

The conference essentially tried to attack in a creative way the issues around the creation of systems that function optimally. Truly changing culture and providing optimal care delivery should always result in putting the patient at the center of care. The conversation was open and the conference succeeded in fostering important dialogue among the speakers and the audience.  A major focus was on creating systems, looking at technological or financial solutions, and measuring outcomes.

The session on team care (“Creating teams to improve inter- and intra-health care systems: Does evidence show a benefit?”)  highlighted the vexing issues around how to truly foster optimal teams. Lisa Schilling, RN, MPH, VP National HC Performance Improvement, Director, Center for […]

2016-11-21T13:08:48-05:00December 5th, 2012|digital health, health care policy, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Health information Technology, EHRs, Meaningful Use, and Nursing

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

If you’re like most nurses working in a health care organization, you’ve been involved in a migration to electronic health records, computerized physician order entry (CPOE), or bar code medication administration.

If you’re lucky, nursing input was considered during the planning stages of all this health information technology (HIT). We’ve heard from many nurses (and have had a few submissions from nurses about their experiences—see for example the Reflections essay “Paper Chart Nurse”) who have had “issues” with the systems or who wonder, why the big push?

In the August issue of AJN, which is available online and on the iPad (download the app here), Susan McBride and colleagues John Delaney and Mari Tietze debut their three-part series on HIT. The first article, “Health Information Technology and Nursing,” examines the federal policies behind efforts to expand the use of this technology, the importance of meaningful use, and the implications for nurses. Subsequent articles upcoming in the fall will take a closer look at the use of HIT to improve patient safety and quality of care, and the important role nurses are playing—and could play—in this system-wide initiative.

It’s crucial for nurses to understand HIT. As the authors note,

“If HIT systems are going to truly improve care, nurses need a voice in their planning and development to ensure patient safety and system usability. The success of this technology depends on nurses informing the […]

2016-11-21T13:09:28-05:00August 15th, 2012|digital health, nursing perspective|3 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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