Advisors
Dr. Guenter Tusch tuschg@gvsu.edu
Keywords
Electronic Health Records, Outcomes, Mortality Rates
Abstract
In 2009 the United States Federal government put forth an act (HITECH Act) that encouraged healthcare facilities to move from paper records to Electronic Health Records (EHR). Since this act, the implementation of EHR systems has exponentially grown. From the time of 2010 to 2014 alone these systems have been implemented in 75.5% of hospitals across the United States. One of the main reasons for the push to install hospitals with these systems was to increase the outcomes related to the effectiveness of patient care. Which past studies have shown, has not worked. Time has passed now since this implementation period and these EHR systems have had time to mature and the workers themselves had time to familiarize themselves with them. Now the question is asked once again; Are EHR systems increasing outcomes? In this article, the question was proposed once more, but this time focusing on mortality rate. Data was collected from articles that were published within the past five years. These articles as well were looking at mortality rates. After synthesizing all the data, it becomes apparent that EHR systems are having a positive effect on mortality rate with most hospitals as a whole. The keyword is most, some hospitals are lagging behind, as well as some EHR vendors not producing effective and efficient systems. When the data was further analyzed, it is noticed when looking at specific diseases, EHR is not producing great numbers and in fact, lacking. This, in turn, proves why EHR systems still need to be probed and studied more to find the barriers that are making them ineffective. We still do not know why they are failing when looking at specific diseases as well as figuring out how to overcome certain barriers.
ScholarWorks Citation
Locke, Robert, "A Literature Review of:Has Electronic Health Records decrease Mortality Rates" (2020). Health Informatics and Bioinformatics Capstone Projects. 12.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mbi_capstone/12
