The educational electronic health record (EHR) and learning platform, EHR GO, was utilized to familiarize students with an EHR program. This particular assignment was helpful to me to not only obtain hands on experience in navigating a patient’s EHR but also provided me with the opportunity to see various embedded links that are available to clinicians. In this activity, I refamiliarized myself with medical terminology as well as the formatting for ICD-10 codes compared to ICD-9, in addition to learning about SNOMED CT. This activity also prompted critical thinking skills by providing feedback on improvements that could be made to this particular EHR program. As an example I recommended utilizing a different font to ensure the legibility between the “I” and number “1” which is particularly important with ICD-9 formatting that began with numbers as opposed to ICD-10 which begins with letters.
In another EHR GO exercise, my health science knowledge and skills were demonstrated while utilizing the EHR to retrieve data for a study. This assignment demonstrates an understanding of chronic disease drivers for the United States health care system and how consistency of following protocols is important in the treatment of patients. The retrieval of data allowed for inconsistencies to be identified and the activity showed how algorithms can be useful in the retrieval process.
While writing my paper “Privacy and Security Issues Associated with Patient Portals,” I was able to demonstrate an understanding of the United States health care delivery system and the many laws and regulations that have been designed to protect patients and their information. Health science knowledge and skills were proven by demonstrating an understanding of the evolution of the EHR and how they have evolved into useful tools such as patient portals.
