Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash
Welcome to Your EHR Orientation
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are an innovative health information technology (HIT) that are becoming more integral to the delivery of quality patient care. Through the use of EHRs, healthcare organizations are able to have timely access to patient medical information, such as medical history and treatment plans; providers are able to have access to evidence-based tools to aid in clinical decision making; and complex provider workflows can be streamlined (The Office of the National Coordination for Health Information Technology, 2019). With patient engagement and shared decision making (both referring to a patient’s desire to be more informed and actively involved in all decisions pertaining to their care) becoming an emerging trend in the modern healthcare industry, it is crucial that the general patient population become familiar with this transformative technology. Such understanding will allow patients to be able to effectively leverage both existing and emerging HIT as assistive technologies in the management of their healthcare.
Resource Objective
This online patient education training resource was developed to provide this exact training! Based on the Constructivism theory of learning – where learners make meaning and interpretations through personal experiences (James, 2020) – and the open pedagogy paradigm – where learners are invited to be co-creators of information rather than simple consumers (University of Texas Arlington, 2020) – the aim of this resource is not only to educate patients on the concept of EHRs, but to help them better manage their care through the use of EHRs/HIT and to foster the development of an online patient-community knowledge base.
Our Strategy at a Glance
To achieve our proposed resource objective, we are employing the use of a plethora of multimedia – namely online forums, video clips, online reading resources, interactive quizzes and hyperlinks to sourced materials – all of which will be open educational resources (OER) or made freely available for our learners in keeping with our open pedagogical approach. For our lessons, the general structure will adhere to Merrill’s (2018) first principles of instruction – activation, demonstration, application, and integration. Through the adoption of this 4 prong approach, we believe that our learners will not only be able to learn about the role of EHRs in modern medicine, but that they will also be empowered to seek out how best to utilize both existing and emerging health information technologies to manage their care and health information as partners of the care process.