Improving Clinician Communication: How SAFER Aids in EHR Integration - Essay Sample

Introduction

Communication is a vital tool when it comes to the healthcare setting, and it usually takes many forms and channels. Miscommunication, more so between clinicians has been a cause of patient harm and medical errors. The incorporation of EHR has been a significant step towards achieving effective communication between clinicians. However, even this has faced breakdowns about disconnections in communication, misdirected messages among other glitches. SAFER, therefore, works towards the achievement of efficiency when it comes to the utilization of EHR for communication between clinicians.

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The Rationale for Practice and Risk Assessment

The availability of safe health IT is as crucial as the ability of the clinicians to use the health IT safely, and these form the basis of the recommendations made by the SAFER guide towards the changes required to make EHR work. Safe health IT needs to be time-conscious, and hence deliver urgent messages to clinicians in time as well as record the message for future references. This would be achieved by incorporating face-to-face communication alongside the use of EHR as well as allowing automatic forwarding of content and messages to the clinicians. Many instances often have the EHR loaded with unnecessary messages, and this tends to disrupt the flow of crucial information to the intended recipients. To overcome this, the healthcare facility can come up with a policy, stipulating the content to be transmitted as well as the valid recipients for such content. The 'reply all' option can be limited to specific situations.

Suggested Sources of Input EHR Developer

Health IT Support Staff

Potentially Useful Practices

Enabling an all-time tracking system for the EHR is therefore crucial as this will allow for clinicians to confirm their consults and referrals. This tracking can be extended to incorporate the source and timing of a message. The information under this domain includes the time, date, telephone number, sender's name, and physical address. The safe utilization of the EHR, therefore, includes easy access to electronic information about consults and referral in time. The ability to incorporate the urgency of a message enables timely responding to content.

Self-assessment The organization has put in place adequate EHR resources, but their maximum potential is not realized. Many clinicians miss on important deadlines due to overloaded EHR systems that do not prioritize messages depending on their time of arrival or urgency. Therefore, some patient's referrals are delayed.

Follow-up actions Assessing the rate of urgency attached to urgent messages

Evaluating the health IT system with the aim of determining the sharing abilities of the EHR as well as the dissemination of personalized information.

References

Self-Assessment Clinician Communication (2016). SAFER. Retrieved from https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/safer/guides/safer_clinician_communication.pdf