| Decades of increased healthcare costs combined with a decline in quality of care for patients led multiple stakeholders with parallel intentions to seek to reverse these trends. Implementation of electronic health records (EHR) across the nation was viewed as a feasible means for improving productivity, workflow, and patient/provider interactions. Improving the usage of EHR was understood as a further measure to ensure efficiency, promote cost reduction, and safely store patient data. Current literature and general advances in technology make quantitative investigations obsolete. This phenomenological qualitative study addressed ways to improve the productive collection and maintenance of patient health information using EHR in suburban clinical settings. Eleven clinic managers within Galveston County, Texas participated in interviews about their experience with EHR usage. Interview data was beneficial in determining how healthcare clinic managers perceived the use of EHR in the productive collection and maintenance of patient data. The study concluded that prior methods of data collection were not preferred, but occasionally necessary to obtain and preserve patient data. What EHR offers is the promise of a more productive means for obtaining and maintaining data in the future years to come once more improvements are made. |
