Toward a Meaningful Electronic Health Record: Tapping the Expertise of the Psychiatric Mental Health Clinical Nurse Specialist

摘要

The current era of health care delivery reform is ripe with numerous opportunities for nurses—including psychiatric-mental health nurses—to transform practice through the adoption and integration of technology. Financial incentives of approximately $30 billion to health care providers and hospitals as a result of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 spurred the rapid adoption of electronic health records (Bitton, Flier, and Jha, 2012), although psychiatric hospitals and community mental health centers have been excluded in HITECH Act, making these facilities ineligible for federal electronic health record (EHR) incentives. This, in part, resulted in low EHR adoption rate of 2% among psychiatric hospitals compared with 12% among their nonpsychiatric short-term acute care hospital counterparts across the United States (Wolf, Harvell, & Jha, 2012). Nonetheless, informatics experts contend that instead of questioning whether EHRs would be adopted in health care, one should ponder whether these EHRs would truly support emerging and innovative paradigms of care delivery aimed to make health care safer, effective, and efficient (Bitton etal, 2012).