Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records for Physician Collaboration: A Patient Centered Health Care Perspective

Abstract

EHRs (Electronic Health Records), can contribute greatly to improving care and managing the rising costs of healthcare. The use and the integration of EHRs (Electronic Health Records) in supporting collaboration to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare remains a challenge. It appears that the physicians are at the center of this bottleneck.As healthcare is provided by interdisciplinary teams of clinicians and collaboration and coordination are key to success. Literature suggests reasons for the limited use relate to policy, financial and usability considerations, but it does not provide an understanding of reasons for physicians' limited interaction and adaptation of EHR. This paper investigates how "meaningful use" of EHRs by physicians enable patient centered healthcare to be achieved.Following an analysis of qualitative data, collected in a case study at a hospital using interviews, this research shows how a collaborative technology architecture can enable the reduction in the costs of healthcare and improvements in the quality of care by enabling more patient centered health care.

Electronic Health Record Management: Expectations, Issues, and Challenges

“…Prior research suggests that physicians are reluctant in giving a positive response to Information System implementation that interferes with their existing routines [16]. Research highlights that the physician's response to the lack of support for their knowledge needs is to request additional system enhancements for their work and data access.…”

“…They voice dissatisfaction with the present EHR interface. Hence, the frustration among the physicians and their loss of productivity because of EHR persists [16].…”

“…The biggest area of concern is the lack of concurrent access which results in productivity loss, communication inefficiency, and collaboration interference [16].…”

“…Healthcare providers have certain legal and ethical obligations for securely exchanging the health information. Unfortunately, physicians are provided with minimal training for achieving this goal [15,16].…”

Electronic Health Records: Applications, Techniques and Challenges

“…It minimizes the increased costs of healthcare and achieves service continuity. In future research, it is necessary to evaluate patient-centered care outcomes by applying technological products based on EHR data [59].…”