For our third installment of Academic EHRs vs. Regular EHRs, I'd like to talk about one of the biggest differences for us at EHR Tutor between our academic EHR vs. a typical EHR designed for hospitals: ease of use. We designed our entire system as an Academic EHR specifically which meant we had instructors in mind during the entire process. During every step of the coding and design process, we were constantly asking ourselves "What would an instructor need?", "What would help nursing students". We didn't consider just hospitals, we considered classrooms first.
As an addition to our previous post on Academic Electronic Health Records (EHRs), we'd like to add another feature to consider when comparing academic EHRs to regular ones.
We've heard the question often - "What is an academic EHR?". It's often a question presented by nursing instructors or students, people who are very familiar with electronic health records and electronic medical records. However, an academic EHR is not the same as the ones you'll find in hospitals.
Based on a suggestion from one of the participants at HOSA 2013, we've decided to spend a day brainstorming all the different ways you can use Google's free applications in your classroom. Any of the apps below can be used on any computer with your free gmail account. If you or one of your students does not have a gmail account, create one at https://accounts.google.com/SignUp.
While browsing the web for grants to help fund schools looking to purchase an academic EHR system, I found one common thread running through many technology grants - a focus on rural education.
For those schools serving rural populations or running programs that provide distance learning to sparsely populated communities, here are some grants that make paying for an academic EHR (like EHR Tutor!!) a little easier.
1. The DLT Grant Program
Grant Range:
$50,000 - $500,000
What the website says:
The DLT Grant Program competitively selects and funds projects that place distance learning and/or telemedical equipment in rural facilities capable of linking local service providers of education and/or healthcare directly to educators and medical professionals and specialists located in distant areas. Rural facilities can include public or private schools, training facilities, higher learning institutions, libraries, health clinics, rural hospitals, ambulance services and other rural community facilities. The kinds of learning and health care services that are funded originate at the grass roots level and represent needed services which are tailored to the areas from which the projects originate.
What it means for your school:
Does your school provide e-learning or distance learning options? If so you may qualify by connecting rural students to "education/nursing specialists". EHR Tutor fits in to this grant perfectly considering it's a web based program. Which means, students can log in anywhere in the world (perfect for e-learnings and distance learning)
Before EHR Tutor existed, we spent most of our days working on FreeNurseTutor.com which you can still use while waiting for your school to get on board with our new product.
The percentage of medical offices using EHRs/EMRs is skyrocketing. In December 2012 a report was released comparing the percentage of offices using electronic health record usage from 2001 to 2012.