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Improve patient safety with EHRs

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, January 24, 2008

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Electronic health records (EHRs) can do an extraordinarily good job of helping to improve patient safety during handoffs and transitions within the healthcare system. For example, consider a patient who is admitted to the hospital and then released. Patients may be advised to stop taking certain medications, or might have been prescribed new drugs. An automated system does a very good job of transferring that information hospitalwide. Otherwise, the information would need to be mailed, faxed, or handed off, and information might be lost in the process. Lost information could mean caregivers are basing decisions on incomplete or outdated information.

EHRs can also improve the process of transitioning test results between staff members or departments. EHRs make it easy to check the following at any point in the process:

• Did the physician request a lab test?
• Did the lab staff complete the test?
• Did the physician receive the test results?
• Did a staff member enter the test results into the EHR?
• Were the results normal or abnormal?
• Did the physician review the results?

To get more information, go to Medical Records Briefing (MRB). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire January issue of MRB. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of MRB have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their January issue.

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