The focus of this assignment is to increase your knowledge and understanding of how informatics, specifically the electronic medical record, improves the pediatric patient health outcomes. Caring for the pediatric patient has unique elements that are not applicable in the adult population. Examples are growth and development surveillance, vaccine records, transitional changes that affect “normal findings” by age group. For example, the normal respiratory rate of a newborn is significantly different from a 10-year-old. Additionally, pediatric healthcare providers are expected to educate parents with “anticipatory guidance” according to the age of the patient. For this assignment, you are expected to analyze the utilization of the EMR that you are using in your clinical practicum and evaluate how this particular EMR system is improving health outcomes. For example, does the EMR that you are using have mechanisms in place that track growth and development, which has led to early identification of abnormals?
This assignment has three parts. The first part is identifying the recommended pediatric-specific functionalities of the EMR system you are using. The template will guide you through the first part of the assignment by addressing a sample of key functionalities.
Part 2 addresses some basic functions that would be recommended in any non-specific EMR.
Part 3 asks you to discuss how your system is addressing certain outcomes such as safety, collaboration, and the prevention of medication errors.
EMR system improves health outcomes by reducing medical errors and allowing the PNPs to address the exact health problems. It produces alerts especially related to misdiagnosis and health problems allowing the PNP to address them before they worsen. It improves collaboration as it enables an individual PNP to collaborate with other health providers, especially when addressing a specific health problem. EMR system provides medication history and referral information, which encourages collaboration. It also allows PNP to share patient health information to come up with an effective treatment strategy (Zahabi, Kaber, & Swangnetr, 2015). It enables all practitioners to track early red flags or others because it uses biometric specific norms for growth curves and supports growth charts for children. It produces red flag alerts when a child does not attain projected growth and development milestones. It monitors the child’s organ functionality reducing detect any
