Electronic Medication Administration Records Paper

Electronic Medication Administration Records Affect on Patient Safety
In today’s society it is excepted to receive exemplary quality care when admitted to a healthcare facility. This means that the patient is to receive safe and effective care from the nurse and interdisciplinary health care team, with the goal of obtaining positive patient outcomes. These goals can be partially obtained with the use of the advancements in information technology. Information technology has the potential to increase patient safety, improve continuity of care, and change the way healthcare is delivered (Moreland, Gallagher, Bena, Morrison, & Albert, 2012). Electronic medical records (EMRs) and its components was one form of technology developed to achieve these goals. Electronic medication administration records (EMARs), is one of the major and utmost important components of electronic medical records (Moreland, Gallagher, Bena, Morrison, & Albert, 2012). This being since …show more content…
Of all these medication errors 400,000 of these errors yearly have been reported that they could have been preventable (Hunter, 2011). The advantages of electronic medication administration records are that the five rights of medication administration are verified; when a medication that requires lab work the patient’s lab work will appear allowing the nurse to view the value before administering the medication; warning boxes appear when information does not match, for instance: “medication is for a different patient” (Hunter, 2011). During a study conducted by Karen Hunter published in the Online Journal of Nursing Informatics electronic medication administration records as well as barcoding systems where placed in hospitals. Sixty-two percent of the nurses stated they felt safer using the system and that the system actually prevented them from making a medication error (Hunter,