Funding supports research that seeks to reduce nursing EHR burden, perceived missed nursing care, and medication errors.
Baltimore, Md. – The University of Maryland School of Nursing’s (UMSON) Alison M. Trinkoff, ScD, MPH, RN, FAAN, professor, has been awarded $1.94 million over five years from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to fund the research project titled “EHR Usability and Usefulness, Perceived Missed Nursing Care, and Medication Errors in Critical Care.”
Trinkoff is the principal investigator (PI) on the grant. She is joined by co-investigators Kyungsook Gartrell, PhD ’14, MS ’10, BSN ’05, RN, UMSON assistant professor, and Chixiang Chen, PhD, assistant professor, University of Maryland School of Medicine, in addition to multiple PI Ayse Gurses, PhD, MS, and other collaborators from Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt universities.
Nurses spend, on average, one-third of patient care time interacting with the electronic health record (EHR), according to Higgins, et al., a 2017 study published in the Journal of Nursing Care Quality. Other studies, including results from an international survey, assert that over 90% of nurses are dissatisfied with inpatient EHR use, burden, and time demands and have concerns about the impact of EHR on patient care quality and safety.
Few studies examine the impact of EHR usage on nurses. Those that have done so typically examine a single aspect of EHR usability or usefulness, and only a small number link nurse EHR usage to patient safety and quality outcomes.