NR 439 Evidence Based Practice Paper | ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS.

NR 439 Evidence Based Practice Paper | ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS. Abstract As nurses we will be surrounded by an ever changing world and it is our duty to provide each patient with a continuity of care. The purpose of this paper is to outline certain impacts that electronic medical records systems have on the role of nurses and the nursing process. This study source was downloaded by from CourseH on :24:55 GMT -06:00 Electronic Medical Records 3 Electronic Medical Records: Are they the nurses’ friend or foe? In today’s world computers have become the norm rather than the oddity that they once were and this trend makes it a necessity to have computer literacy, whether in our personal lives or our professional lives. While electronic medical records (EMR’s) are an effective time management tool, some may question how exactly they impact the role of nurses and the nursing process and the ultimate effects on such things as patient safety and confidentiality. In order to investigate these topics I will be addressing the individual aspects of EMR’s that nurses use every day, how they affect collaborative care, and what impact they have on the role of nurses. First off, how do EMR’s improve the nursing process? We all know that nurses have always had paperwork to complete on each patient under their care. According to Gugerty (2006), this paperwork includes, but is not limited, to assessment forms, plans of care, flow sheets, and many other miscellaneous types of documentation all of which required a place at the nurses’ station for completion and an area for filing patient charts. Extensive storage spaces were required in order to protect patients’ records so that they would have access to all medical records for several years in case they had any legal reasons for needing the information. This all took time and money to accomplish successfully in order to have long term viability of the records. In the days before EMR’s the general process of patient care for the “uncomplicated” case would be as follows: provider assesses the patient, provider ordered medication, clerk transcribed the order, pharmacist verified the order, pharmacist dispensed the medication, nurse received the medication from the pharmacist, nurse verified the dispensed medication against the providers order, nurse administrated the medication to the appropriate patient, and finally the nurse would assesses the effects of the medications on the patient. These steps took a long time to complete which allowed for more errors to occur.