The role of nursing EHRs for nurses' education

According to Regis College, proficiency in nursing EHR is essential for all nursing personnel since they are expected to work with patients’ electronic health records every day. However, there’s one more vital advantage of EHR literacy for future RNs: once new nurses learn to use EHR confidently, they can gain hands-on professional knowledge from the system and become skilled specialists faster. 

Why nurses need their own EHR system

Both nurses and doctors use EHRs to view, store, and exchange patient information. Nonetheless, nurses typically use EHRs to access the information about patients’ conditions and treatment prescribed by clinicians, document the timeline of care received, log changes in patients’ vitals, and note patients’ reactions to treatment, and other information. Physicians, on the other hand, use EHRs to order and interpret tests, determine the right diagnosis, develop treatment plans, and oversee the treatment.

Large healthcare organizations that provide a wide variety of medical services usually have powerful EHR systems with modules to cover the needs of multiple specialists. Those can be more or less user-friendly for nursing personnel depending on the system. On the other hand, long-term care facilities, schools, home health agencies, and other organizations that rely on nursing care more extensively have EHR systems better tailored to nurses’ needs. Due to the expanded feature set, EHR systems in such organizations contain detailed information regarding patient conditions, the practical side of their treatments, and result logs, which are invaluable for comprehensive nursing education.

EHR features essential for nurses’ training

Entering their first workplace with hands-on knowledge of EHR systems, nurses can continue their education in practice and greatly sharpen their skills and decision-making capabilities.

1. Electronic bedside note-taking

Nurses should make it a habit to document bedside notes for each patient. Such notes can help new nurses learn from the experiences of their more skilled colleagues and improve their clinical decision-making. 

By reviewing bedside notes, nurses can gain valuable insights into diverse and practical care approaches, identify patterns that lead to better patient outcomes, observe note-taking styles of experienced nurses, and learn to summarize patient assessments, interventions, and progress for comprehensible and accurate documentation.

1. Medication administration record

New nurses can gain hands-on experience with medication administration protocols, dosage calculations, and patient safety guidelines through well-documented treatment records. They can discover correlations between different methods of medication administration, as well as learn to quickly assess possible effects of drug combinations and recognize the signs that the dosage or the type of drug should be adjusted. Nursing specialists can also learn to identify and prevent potential medication errors, overdosages, and fraud by reviewing patient medication history across different healthcare providers.

1. Documentation templates and forms

Creating and utilizing documentation templates and forms takes time, but they can help significantly expedite administrative processes for nursing personnel. First of all, templates free up medical professionals’ time that can be dedicated to patient-centered care. The second advantage of using forms and outline templates is the standardization, clarity, and consistency of the documentation across different teams. In the long run, this improves coordination among all healthcare personnel and helps them deliver more holistic patient care.

Last but not least, templates help new nurses get all steps of the usual medical workflow right. Some EHRs contain knowledge bases for healthcare professionals to learn new skills or upgrade the old ones, yet this is not true for all systems. If a particular system doesn’t have a knowledge base, and the nurse has forgotten some aspect of patient assessment or treatment procedure, they can find the reminder in the template. 

1. Electronic communication tools

Mastering the EHRs’ built-in secure communication tools is essential for nurses to collaborate with their colleagues and clinicians. Collaborative documentation processes, such as shared care plans and discharge summaries, teach new nurses how to work with other providers to create comprehensive patient records. Also, when EHRs are equipped with patient portals, nurses can interact with the patients remotely and learn to better understand patients’ needs and provide more personalized patient care.

1. Data analysis and reporting

Besides the practical side of caring for patients and communicating with other healthcare professionals, new nurses can utilize EHRs’ analytical tools to assess the effectiveness of their interventions. This way, they can rely more on hard data and not just personal experience in their practice and understand areas for improvement in their work.

In conclusion

Good EHRs provide access to comprehensive patient information, streamline documentation, and facilitate interprofessional communication. Yet specialized nursing EHRs have capabilities and interfaces that are especially useful for nursing personnel. For instance, they contain information and tools that support new nurses throughout the beginning of their careers.  

Mastering this type of system allows nurses to tap into their experienced colleagues’ practices and learn to work faster and more efficiently. Therefore, healthcare organizations need to improve the interoperability between different EHRs, promote wider usage of nursing-specific systems or modules, and improve the quality of EHR training for nursing personnel if they want to enable their workers to learn fast and provide better care.