Incorporating Electronic Health Records into the Nursing or CNA classroom isn't just about learning how to chart. It's about teaching students how to think... critically.
Last week we were at the IACTE Conference and did a presentation about using an Academic EHR in the classroom. During the session we had help from our audience to come up with some great teaching tips and tools for Nutrition programs and Nutrition classes.
We recently hosted a free webinar on medication administration and have been promoting our barcode scanning feature for the last few weeks. Why? Because medication administration is a big deal in the world of EHR meaningful use measures. For stage two of meaningful use requirements, medical practices must "enable a user to create a single reconciled list of medications, medication allergies, or problems" among other medication related requirements.
We all know that charting is moving to EHRs and EMRs, largely because of the Affordable Care Act and the HITECH Act. As practitioners are preparing to qualify for Stage 2 Meaningful Use Criteria, it's important for instructors to be aware of what students will be facing in the field from this point forward.
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.