How I Got Started With The Electronic Health Record

I have been an attorney for nearly 30 years. Prior to that I was a licensed nurse throughout several healthcare systems in the state of Florida. As my law practice grew, I made sure to keep my hands in healthcare and noticed a growing legal issue with the implementation of the electronic health record. In this video I discuss how I got started lecturing on the EHR throughout the US.

I’m going to speak with you briefly about how I got started with the electronic health record. On the author page of this website, you’ll see that my e-book is very beneficial in bringing awareness regarding the electronic health record.

It covers documentation and discusses how it’s important to document properly and avoid litigation. In fact, that’s the title of the book: “The Electronic Health Record: Document Properly – Avoid Litigation.

It’s a very important reading. It brings great awareness. The reason I’m talking to you about it is I want you to know how I got started with this. I was a risk manager. I was already an attorney. I’ve been an attorney since 1991 and I was a nurse before that. I actually did both at the same time.

My goal was to bring it all back to health care. I’m a former assistant city attorney. I work as a special magistrate, but every skill, everything I’ve learned, my goal is always saying to bring it back to health care.

So the way I got started with the electronic health records, was that I was asked when I was functioning as a risk manager for a major healthcare system. I was asked to put together a lecture on documented.

When I did that, it went well. I think the first time I did it for the system I had about 300 people. After that I did it several times for that system. After I left the system I was working at I was asked, “what happened to that lecture.”

So I took it and continued to give it throughout the State of Florida. It was my lecture because I put it together. So I said, “wow, people really enjoyed that. Let me see what I could do.”

And what I did was I updated it and I worked on it. You have to always keep doing research and I wanted to make sure it was still relevant.

I brought it to other systems. I’ve been to other large systems, small systems, schools of nursing and podiatry and more. I’ve gotten the opportunity to speak to medical students and nursing students especially, all sorts of people in the healthcare profession. Nurses especially benefit from it and I was so happy to bring it.

That’s how I got started in the electronic health record. What I do now is I keep it going. What does that mean? I keep updating the information and I’m scheduled to speak at different places all over the US. I’m very excited about that.

This year I’ll be going to schools, hospitals, and I’m scheduled to speak for big organizations at their national conference. It feels really good to give this information.

It’s so funny because I was speaking with an attorney colleague who said to me one day, “Dawn, the energy you have when you start to talk about health care and giving health care information, you get so excited.”

I said, “yeah I do” because my goal is to help nurses not get sued. I want to keep bringing this information. The ebook has examples of things that we can do, that we have done, and that are being done and lawsuits that were subsequent to these actions. All as it relates to working within the electronic health record and the outcome.

So we know firsthand how important it is to do certain things. That’s what I’m about in that lecture and that ebook. I cover drop down menus and copying and pasting and all these things that we do every day at work.

Sometimes we don’t realize the importance of knowing how serious those things are because we do a lot of things at once. We get very preoccupied with different things you know and that’s the job.

But we still need to be able to have in the back of our heads and keep it on the forefront if you will in our actions and in our awareness. What we must look at. What we must do and how he must do things. And that’s the information I bring as best I can.