nurse using computer
Do nurses compute?

April 14, 2010 -- The California Healthcare Foundation reports in its Survey: Nurses Divided on Whether EHRs Have Improved Patient Care that half of nurses say that electronic health records have had "a positive effect on the overall quality of care."

And then there's the other half. My own experience -- now that I've worked with yet another EHR (Kaiser's HealthConnect by Epic) on a few clinical rotations -- is that nurses do spend an awful lot of time in front of the computer. This could easily lead to the perception that it takes away from time with patients. But is that true? Didn't they also spend a lot of time charting on paper before there were electronic charts? And isn't it also true that record-keeping and access is far better than it ever used to be? Especially with bar code readers and the electronic Medications Administration Record (MAR) the chances for errors are substantially reduced. So in this writer's humble opinion, computerization has helped make nursing care a lot better. Or at least half of it.

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