Nursing & Healthcare

Marie Mirna Lexima is in the field of Health Services Research.

She is passionate about the use of Electronic Health Record as a conduit to improve health and healthcare. She spent two years working on her dissertation as a Doctoral Student at Walden University and has conducted her quantitative research study in several underserved communities. Her contextual holistic care application model led to an integrative holistic health and care plan models suitable to improve the health and well-being of the underserved and applicable in almost any health care setting. She used system thinking and innovation diffusion theories as the foundation for her holistic care conceptual application model. This approach was conducive to the chronic care management and care coordination motivational effort to improve care, after years of experience working in outpatient settings, and to fetch much value toward reaching replicable and sustainable results.

Our modern health care system requires technology that can deal with multidisciplinary and complex processes, operations, and situations. The EHR, by far, is one of the greatest health information technology innovations that satisfy these requirements because of its efficiency and the effectiveness of its features. This study sought to develop an in-depth understanding of how underserved patients’ perspectives about their health and illness, can contribute to greater use of the EHR. It also sought to improve their health outcomes and maintain sustainable change in the lives of the underserved. A quantitative nonexperimental design study was conducted over a 6-week period outside of three different internal medicine clinics, one in the Northwestern and the two others in the Southeastern regions of Washington, DC. Surveys were distributed directly to patients coming out of these health clinics, and participants sent their responses via mail. Data collection included 215 surveys out of 560, but, only 155 fit the overall study categories. A strong level of significance in the relationships between clinical outcome measures and the EHR was identified at a 95% confidence interval. There were considerable health determinants that demonstrated the essence of patients’ perspectives and the need for its incorporation into health outcomes measures for the underserved populations. The study also identified sets of environmental health predictors which acted as facilitators and contributors to a holistic health management model designed to contribute to the needs of the underserved communities. The holistic health model and the individual care plan model derived from the study are applicable at the level of the underserved population. It can help achieve sustainable health outcomes that will save lives and promote better health