Meaningful Use and the EHR

EHR vendors play a critical role in creating higher quality, safer, more effective health care systems.  Whether it's through ePrescribing, drug interaction screening or dose range checking, EHR systems offer clinical decision support to enhance therapy decisions.  Recently, the final rules were published by the Department of Health and Human Services defining meaningful use of EHR and the EHR incentive program.  Health care providers now have additional funding to support the meaningful use of EHR as well as guidelines that can help implementation in a way that improves patient care.  Benefits of meaningful use of EHR include:

• Know more about patients - Information in the EHR such as patient medication lists can be used to coordinate and improve the quality of patient care.
• Make better decisions - With more information and clinical guidelines available for clinical decision support, healthcare professionals will have the information they need regarding treatments and conditions.  Information ranging from pediatric dose calculations to duplicate therapy alerts help clinicians make better decisions.
• Save money - EHR adoption requires an initial investment of time and money but clinicians who have implemented EHR systems have reported significant time savings, workflow efficiencies as well as receiving government incentives.