Embedding practice guidelines and clinical pathways into electronic medical record systems have advantages and disadvantages. For instance, this practice ensures the availability of efficient and high-quality information for use by healthcare professionals, which leads to the elimination of medical errors occurrence. The availability of adequate and accurate information for healthcare professionals also improves care outcomes. It ensures that care is delivered following evidence-based guidelines, thereby maximizing care standards and quality outcomes. The practice also reduces care variation and controls costs, reducing unnecessary diagnostic tests during care provision. Reduction of care variation decreases care fragmentation hence optimizing cost-effectiveness (Hipp et al., 2016). This consequently leads to focused care, which drives care funds to proven care strategies. The practice ensures the engagement of multidisciplinary teams, which encourages collaboration. According to Seaton et al. (2020), collaboration in healthcare has been proven to improve care delivery and care outcomes. Moreover, integrating electronic clinical pathways with multi reporting functionality leads to efficient access to patient information by hospital leaders, thereby helping them identify improvement areas within the pathway.
Integrating practice guidelines and clinical pathways into electronic medical record systems also have disadvantages with complications arising from the operation and computerization of information. Additionally, increased costs that are associated with this practice may cripple a facility’s financial status. For instance, the costs of purchasing software and hardware, as well as employee training, may be costly. Confidentiality of patient information in clinical pathways is a significant disadvantage associated with this practice, as information from a facility is often shared with insurance companies for reimbursement. More importantly, data security from unauthorized breaches is a problem that most healthcare facilities using electronic systems with integrated clinical pathways struggle to deal with. Data inaccuracy is also a problem, as data entered into the system may not be accurate, hence unreliable, consequently resulting in increased patient risks and liabilities for clinicians and organizations (Jamshed et al., 2015).
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
References
Hipp, R., Abel, E., & Weber, R. J. (2016). A primer on clinical pathways. Hospital Pharmacy , 51 (5), 416-421. https://doi.org/10.1310/hpj5105-416
Jamshed, N., Ozair, F., Sharma, A., & Aggarwal, P. (2015). Ethical issues in electronic health records: A general overview. Perspectives in Clinical Research , 6 (2), 73. https://doi.org/10.4103/2229-3485.153997
Seaton, J., Jones, A., Johnston, C., & Francis, K. (2020). Allied health professionals’ perceptions of interprofessional collaboration in primary health care: An integrative review. Journal of Interprofessional Care , 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2020.1732311
