Healthcare Organizations and Communication

¶ … care in regards to EMR when patients go from outpatient to inpatient to specialists

Effective Communication

The CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) uses the phrase 'care transition' to refer to patient transference between care settings (like hospitals, nursing facilities, home care, primary care, specialist care, or long-term patient care). Care coordination throughout the continuum of healthcare proves critical to patient treatment management, execution and assessment. Transferring health information of patients from one care location or level to another during patient transfers guarantees care continuity and fosters effective patient treatment. Direct communication between different healthcare providers is vital to smooth patient transition across healthcare settings. Partial knowledge of patient health details and absence of an EHR (electronic health record) that may be accessed anywhere will restrict acute care professionals' capacity of accessing the patient's community pharmacy and ambulatory care records, especially if the professional is not the patient's primary care practitioner (Mansukhani, Bridgeman, Candelario, & Eckert, 2015).

Making use of Technology

EHR systems help healthcare organizations store and subsequently retrieve complete patient facts and health-related information for use by healthcare providers as well as (occasionally) patients, during hospitalization, across different patient care settings, and over time. Tools like embedded medical decision support can effectively aid clinicians in providing more efficient and safer care, superior to that possible by banking on manual systems and provider memory. Furthermore, EHRs aid healthcare organizations in monitoring, reporting and improving data on patient care safety and quality. According to the CMS, EHRs are the next level of ongoing healthcare-sector progress. For achieving an inclusive EHR's complete potential, the health sector needs to make its adoption a part of an industry-wide strategic plan for promoting a patient-focused, integrated care continuum. It forms a sound tool for bettering care coordination by means of swifter, more precise patient-provider communication and communication across healthcare settings. But the EHR is not designed to singlehandedly make changes to practice; thus, workflows need to aim at supporting the utilization of valuable patient facts from the EHR (Sharon Silow-Carrol, 2012).

The implementation of comprehensive EHR at a majority of healthcare organizations was undertaken as part of one strategic approach to integrate outpatient and inpatient care, offering a range of coordinated healthcare services across the systems. EHRs were anticipated to enhance communication between providers stationed at different care locations. Some individuals questioned as part of the study stated that such coordination would prove essential to further reforms to the care delivery system (e.g., developing an accountable healthcare institution). Moreover, patients would not only profit from, but also appreciate, the presence of a coordinated, comprehensive resource holding their medical data, across the healthcare system (Sharon Silow-Carrol, 2012).

Medication Reconciliation