The Effects of Early Adoption of Academic Electronic Health Records System (EHRS) on Patient Outcome in Nursing

Abstract

The wide adoption of EHR systems has led the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to emphasize the use of informatics as a core competency required of all health care professions. However, the nursing profession has been slow to incorporate information technology into formal nurse education and practice. In the massive transformation from disconnected, inefficient, paper-based care delivery to interconnected system driven by EHRs (Electronic Health Records system), little is known about the effect of the early adoption of academic EHRs in nursing education and relationship between effective use of EHRs and patient outcome in nursing. In this study, a community-academic partnership was driven to have better resources to assess the effect of the early adoption of academic EHRs in Nursing education, using the local hospital’s training set of electronic health records system (EHRs). With this pilot study, a quantitative research design with supportive qualitative research will be used. First a two-group quasi-experimental pre-post design will be used to assess changes in nursing students’ readiness/effectiveness of nursing documentation using academic EHRs. Second, a cross-sectional research design will be used to identify the relationship between effectiveness of nursing documentation by nurses (e.g., time) and patient outcome (e.g., incident rate, healthcare associated infections, falls incidences, pressure ulcer incidences, and patient satisfaction). Student and faculty participants will be recruited from one university in the Eastern United States. Nurse participants will be recruited from one hospital in Eastern United States. Patient outcome information will be retrieved from the electronic health record system. These findings will be very helpful to prepare students for the future of health information technology. Meaningful adoption of academic electronic health record systems will help in building the undergraduate nursing students’ competence in nursing documentation with electronic health record systems and improve patient care.