Major Tips to Make Your Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Nurse-friendly

The dissatisfaction of nurse with EHRs (electronic health records) can highly impact the job satisfaction. Usual complaints are disruptions in workflow and productivity, a negative effect on communication between nurses and patients; and many say that EHRs have not essentially improved communication between providers due to the delays in charting. Insufficient staffing, interruptions and excessive documentation requirements in electronic health records (EHRs) add to eCharting delays. For real-time charting, nurses require time to ensure that other health care providers can access up-to-date data on sufferers.

Optimizing clinical workflows to make better patient care and safety, along with enhancing the caregiver efficiency is a priority at Nemours Children’s Health System in Jacksonville, Fla. Senior director of clinical applications, Connie Trusko, R.N. claims, “In the past, our nurses required to document in 2 separate applications for accumulating patient labs. We optimized the electronic health record to encompass both application workflows, thus decreasing that documentation from 2 applications to one.” Clinical pathways were constructed in the electronic health record for particular disease conditions that direct consistency with ordering medications, standard diagnostic tests and specified treatments. Nemours has enabled clinicians to enter documentation, place orders and analyze results right from their iPhones by utilizing a version of their EHR optimized for use on mobile devices.
The EHR tracking boards’ creation and implementation that give real-time visualizations of patient data, like MRSA or implants, assists to make sure that antibiotics are ordered precisely. This usually makes better the patient outcomes and straightly correlates to a reduced risk in surgical infections. 

Suggestions

• Utilize nursing informatics to observe affects on nurse workflow. 
• Ensure that your EHR selection takes nursing workflow into account.
• Streamline procedures to ignore logging in and out, paging through unimportant screens, duplicate entries and attempting to find where to chart something.
• Gain nurse feedback to recognize issues with the system that waste time better spent on patient care.
• Give ongoing training for the nurse documentation and access to superusers well-versed in the technology.