Improve communication and coordination
Order Instructions:
Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a not-for-profit, standards-developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery, and evaluation of health services.
After reading “Strategic Initiatives” (see Module 4 assigned readings), refer to the journals listed:
Search the GCU Library and the websites of professional health care informatics organizations, such as the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Useful periodicals include:
•Health Data Management
•Health Management Technology
•Healthcare Informatics
•Healthcare IT News
Locate a case study that discusses how a health care organization solved a communication problem with a hardware solution while maintaining existing software.
Prepare a professional report (1,250-1,500 words) as if you are the informatics director of a 300-bed facility and the chief operating officer (COO) has given you the following directives:
1.Improve communication and coordination between admitting, laboratory, pharmacy, and clinicians to increase throughput; assume that each department has its own system currently in place.
2.Propose a solution that maintains existing software in each department and is supported by the HL7 initiatives.
In addition, define your focus and select a hardware solution; it may consist of a phased approach or an approach that directs attention only to one of the groups, or it may involve all of the aforementioned departments.
Provide a solution; emphasize interoperability.
Discuss how HL7 will improve communication and coordination between the departments.
Address the challenges of incorporating interoperability mandates from the Office of the National Coordinator.
Consider the challenges of an environment that is best of breed and the desire to move to a standard EHR across a health care enterprise.
Your solution may not implement new EHR software, but must provide a hardware solution to increase throughput.
Be creative with the context and formatting.
Prepare this assignment according to the APA guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.
This assignment uses a grading rubric. Instructors will be using the rubric to grade the assignment; therefore, students should review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the assignment criteria and expectations for successful completion of the assignment.
You are required to submit this assignment to Turnitin. Refer to the directions in the Student Success Center. Only Word documents can be submitted to Turnitin.
SAMPLE ANSWER
Improve communication and coordination
This Healthcare facility is experiencing operational stress due to reduced financial stability. The profit margins are low and the bed capacity records are at their highest. The management demands that there is need to raise the bed capacity to meet the healthcare demands. The most effective approach would not be an addition of new physical building but rather increase of their service capacity to enable serving more patients through an effective management system that increases the throughput (NCBI, 2013). This calls for a technology that will improve communication between the healthcare professionals as well as their coordination by offering real-time patient particulars such as laboratory updates, physician’s information, as well as information from the pharmacists. The system should facilitate the flow of information in the inpatient setting and the emergency department. This sort of technology is not common in most healthcare environment, especially in the surgical environment (Peter et al., 2012).
The HL7 standards aim at establishing set of values and specifications that facilitate free exchange of healthcare information. This will reduce healthcare services incompatibility due to reduced interoperability. For this reason, the proposed healthcare applications should support effective communication of information between the various environments, and should be available in common programming languages. Additionally, the program should have all the elements of each medical field and segments that can be customized (CDC, 2012).
In this context, the researcher is required to eliminate the information gaps in the healthcare system, which often results to expensive healthcare costs such as diagnostic error or medication error. For this reason, the proposed software should be in a position to tackle the challenges by improving interoperability without slowing down the care delivery process or putting patients at risk. Real-Time location system software enables increase interoperability in the healthcare industry by supporting the alignment of the physician through exchange of relevant healthcare information, which facilitates the management of care transitions. Consequently, responsible care is delivered at lower cost. The system involves physical keying of patient particulars, and the patient is provided with a tag that when used in the healthcare system, it reflect the patient particulars with ease. This way, nurse in charge would know the exact dosage for a particular patient, the physician would easily identify referral cases, and pharmacists would learn the patient particulars with ease (Vast & Gamm, 2010).
To increase throughput, the solution is to ensure that the proposed solution is readily available, and is compatible with the preexisting systems; ensuring that relevant data is captured, and is transmitted in a standardized way, such that the quality of information is not lost during the sharing of information. The part of the process will include ensuring that there is a standard code for all of the departments so that information shared is matched. This will ensure that each department gets a system that contains data in the format needed. The system supports teamwork, staff coordination and promotes patient engagement (CDC, 2012).
The benefits associated with the implementation of this technology includes increased throughput and is evidenced by healthcare variables such decreased length of stay, improved billing system (charge capture, reduced ambulance diversions as well as increased patient quality of life and satisfaction. Additionally, the standard implementation is rather straightforward and considerably customizable to meet the healthcare facility demands (Vast & Gamm, 2010).
Challenges of incorporating interoperability
The main challenge of integrating interoperability is the inadequate sustainable models, which can be used to guide the changes, and to assure that the data sources and storage are secure, offer technical support and a system is cost effective. There are increased risks of questions and distrust over who is responsible in controlling of information collected. Additionally, there are concerns on the standardization process. This implies that there are reduced agreements on which set of standards should be used, and in some cases, the standards used are too general and are susceptible to multiple interpretations. This could result to serious errors (King Et al., 2013).
Technology incompatibility is another issue. Although technological systems have similar objectives, some systems have differing ontologies as well as terminologies about the same healthcare or medication concept. This makes it difficult for interoperability (Vast & Gamm, 2010).
Overcoming the challenges
The main approach to overcome these key challenges is the standardized integration of applications and pricing by the manufactures. This will lower the installation, operation, as well as maintenance cost. The healthcare system should explore on ways to improve a culture that adopts changes. Additionally, legal barriers and hospital policies should be annulled. This includes working in partnership with the healthcare providers to debunk the misconceptions that prevails. The healthcare facility should establish a standard coding system and medication symbol and format, which largely influences the rate of interoperability. More efficient as well as effective software should be established to ensure that their i.e. effective communication and coordination between the stakeholders (NCBI, 2013).
Reference list
CDC (2012) Public health surveillance data: legal, policy, ethical, regulatory and practical issues. Supplements 61; 3, p30-34. Retrieved from [http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6103a7.htm?s_cid=su6103a7_x]
King, G. Et al.(2012) Boundaries and e-health implementation in health and social care. BMC Medical informatics and decision making 12; 100, p1-12
NCBI (2013) Sharing Clinical research data: Workshop summary. Retrieved from [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK137823/]
Peter, B. Et al. (2012). Mining electronic health records: towards better research applications and clinical care. Nature reviews 13; p395 -407
Vest, JR., & Gamm, LD. (2010). Health information exchange: persistent challenges and new strategies. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2010 May-Jun; 17(3): 288–294 doi: 10.1136/jamia.2010.003673
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