(From IHS provided materia)l
The IHS Electronic Health Record (EHR) is intended to help providers manage all aspects of patient care by providing a full range of functions for data retrieval and capture to support patient review, encounter and follow up.
The IHS·EHR utilizes a technical infrastructure, or framework, that displays various clinical functions in a graphical user interface (GUI) format. These clinical functions, or "components," are a collection of discrete objects that are visually and operationally integrated within a graphical user interface (GUI) so that the provider sees one "view" of the clinical process.
A true EHR will provide at least minimal support for all aspects of provider interaction with a patient, from pre-visit planning and review to the actual encounter and related orders to the resulting administrative processes. In December 2001, IHS deployed the Patient Chart application, a significant step toward a full EHR.
IHS anticipates testing and deploying the additional functions that will comprise a minimal EHR by summer 2003. The EHR Clinical Advisory Team determines the definition and prioritization of functions that must be available to support the patient continuity of care. Many of these functions are available currently within RPMS; some functions may need to be adapted from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) or from commercial software.
One of the advantages of the IHS·EHR component-based technical approach is that each facility can select the clinical components they want to run and determine their own pace for software and other infrastructure upgrades.
Their choices will be determined by two factors:
A certain degree of hardware infrastructure upgrading will be required at any facility implementing the EHR Framework, regardless of which clinical components are selected. Facilities will need to evaluate hardware needs in or near exam rooms and provider offices to facilitate point of care data entry and retrieval. Deploying the EHR to the providers, who are unlikely to be currently using RPMS directly, can be expected to place new demands on RPMS servers and network systems.
With the appropriate "back end" RPMS components, a facility will have objects that support such functions as:
IHS feels it is more effective to develop and deploy EHR components that can be integrated incrementally at participating hospitals and clinics. The availability of a variety of solutions will allow the system to be flexible in meeting the needs of our different facilities, which are at various levels of infrastructure and technology sophistication. Our aim is to develop technology solutions that are easily extensible to tribes and other rural communities.
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