My First EMR Encounter

It was October 4, 2010, when I first encounter Electronic Medical Record (EMR) in my workplace. The experience was very meaningful to me. During the first few weeks of initiation, all nurses, doctors and CNA's, underwent three day computer courses. Policies and procedures were emphasized and orientation on EHR operation was discussed. After each computer class session, return demonstration with graded evaluation was conducted. On the actual implementation days, the first day I worked was a chaos. Though there were "super users" responsible for helping health workers for EHR, there was not enough help to answer most of the nurses, doctors and CNA's questions. Considering a new hospital electronic system application, EHR was a burden to most health workers. As days past, nurses in different areas started to realize the convenience and benefits of EMR. For most nurses, EMR makes access to patient information a click of a mouse away. Laboratory and radiology results are made fast and handy. It speeds up the admission process in our department and provides more safety to my patients avoiding medical and medication errors. The evaluation of nursing interventions is made more visible through the easy access trends in vital signs, intakes and outputs and electronic documentation of nursing outcomes.

Though most doctors find EMR as waste of time, I find it as an innovative tool that makes my workload now much easier. I can spend more time with my patient, doing bedside care because of faster admission procedure and documentation. EMR is cost effective health approach for my workplace because it gets rid of paper-based charting that is green approach to save trees and US government will provide incentives for facilities using electronic health record. Our hospital participation complies with our nation's plan to implement EMR by 2014.