The electronic medical record (EMR) has become the standard in health care documentation. The EMR has been shown to improve the availability of medical records, provide tools to facilitate communication, and improve patient safety. Because of the absence of standardized training and EMR research, there is a gap in understanding the relationship between the EMR and the provider-patient relationship. The EMR requires the provider to use purposeful and deliberate patient-centered EMR communications behaviors to facilitate a meaningful, engaging, and educational dialogue with patients. These behaviors have been studied in physician populations and standardized tools have been developed to assist in the training and evaluation of physician EMR use in the outpatient setting. The purpose of this project was to take the tools developed for physicians and adapt them for use with nurses in the hospital setting. A small pilot study was conducted to determine whether or not a simulation-based curriculum could improve the EMR communication behaviors of novice nurses. The preliminary results provide initial evidence that a simulation-based, patient-centered EMR communication behavior curriculum could significantly improve the communication between nurses and patients at the bedside, and indicate a need for further research to evaluate the impact of patient-centered EMR communications behaviors on the nurse-patient relationship
