Nurses generally satisfied with EHRs, but key pain points persist | Healthcare IT News

A new report from KLAS and the Arch Collaborative finds that nearly three times as many nurses are satisfied with their electronic health record experience as those who are frustrated. Those findings suggest their may be a way to improve EHRs for physicians, who tend to be more pessimistic in general about the technology.

WHY IT MATTERS “By some accounts, nurses outnumber physicians in the United States four to one,” according to the report. “The feedback from these nurses shows that they have a different experience with the EHR than do other clinician groups, and overall, nurses achieve significantly higher levels of EHR satisfaction than physicians.

Of the nurses polled by KLAS and the Arch Collaborative, 62 percent said they’re pleased with their EHR, 20 percent said they’re frustrated with the technology and 18 percent were indifferent.

Those are somewhat encouraging numbers, given the pessimism many physicians are said still feel for their EHR systems.

“Because nurses work so widely with the EHR and play such a significant role in care delivery, this report is aimed at understanding where there are opportunities for improvement in the nurse experience and what the nurse experience can teach other groups of clinicians about how to succeed with the EHR,” researchers said.

On several key questions, nurses were markedly more optimistic that physicians about EHRs and their potential. Asked whether the technology keeps patients safe, 67 percent of nurses said yes, compared with 47 percent of doctors. More of them also said the systems enable quality care (62 percent of nurses vs. 53 percent of docs) an helps deliver patient-centered care (60 percent to 42 percent, respectively).