In the United States, EHRs implementation is a major requirement for healthcare organizations, a transition that was led by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) through financial incentives supported by policies such as the 2009 HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act (Aguirre et al., 2019). In supporting clinical tasks, EHRs have a legacy in visit documentations, ordering drugs, laboratory, and diagnostic tests, reviewing test outcomes, and tracking/following up patients. The most important usefulness of EHRs is in its application to promote population health through monitoring and surveillance of both infectious and non-infectious diseases, improved patient management, particularly patients with chronic illnesses and identification of populations at high risk of specific diseases. In ensuring the continuity of care, EHRs have proven to be beneficial in managing chronically ill patients by preventing fragmented care, and promoting coordination. Honavar (2020) highlights that, in the Emergency department, EHRs use improve evidence-based therapeutic and diagnostic decision-making through the CDSS (Clinical Decision Support) embedded in its system. EHRs improve healthcare quality and outcomes by improving management, decreasing unnecessary investigations, improving interactions among healthcare staff, patients, and healthcare providers from other institutions involved in the care of patients (Kataria & Ravindran, 2020). From physician’s perspective, EHRs improve efficiency and workflow by decreasing the time needed to retrieve data, improve patient appointment scheduling, and allow remote access to patient data. The limitations of using EHRs are associated with medical information errors, interoperability, and the financial resources needed to implement health information technology. Despite the increased efficiency in gathering and storing information using EHRs, medical errors still happen. According to Kataria & Ravindran (2020), medical errors are particularly associated with wrongly matching patients to their records or creation of duplicate records. Such errors do not only compromise the quality of care but also compromise the safety of patients.
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