EHR Implementation: A Literature Review

Abstract

During the last 30 years, governments and private healthcare organizations started to implement Electronic Health Records. These initiatives have evolved in different ways: some of them were quite successful while some others have found important difficulties. Although they share as a common purpose “to improve the health of the patients in a sustainable system”, their objectives and strategies are also different in each project. Through the existing scientific literature, this article reviews the theoretical benefits of using EHR and the different IT design high level decisions/approaches. It also summarizes the drivers for the adoption of EHR but also the barriers emerged from bad decisions. The article finishes with a review of seven governmental initiatives on implementing EHR sharing the same general objectives. Our categorization of findings (theoretical benefits, design decisions, and implementation drivers and barriers), as far as we know, is new in the literature on EHR implementation and we think it could be useful as a framework for analysis of new EHR scenarios and governmental initiatives.