| Sumario: | Public Health Nurses provide "population-focused care to individuals, groups, and communities" and comprise the largest professional group in the public health workforce (ACHNE, 2010). Public Health Nurses are a unique discipline in which work mainly entails psychosocial interventions and requires documentation that is different than traditional hospital charting. For Public Health Nurses to effectively describe their assessments and interventions, they need to have the ability to express core functions in documentation, either in traditional paper charts or in an electronic health record. Standardized documentation in an electronic health record uses a common language to describe assessments and interventions, making connections in the nursing process more explicit and allowing for extraction of consistent, accurate, and meaningful data. These data can be used to quantify, evaluate, and improve public health nursing practices and are essential to demonstrate measurable program outcomes and meet the federal mandate for electronic health records. This article discusses the transition of the Kitsap Public Health District to an electronic health record and subsequent use of electronic health record data to demonstrate and improve outcomes.
|
|---|