Infrastructure in An Inpatient Care System at A Hospital
We will focus on data management which is the administrative process that involves acquiring, validating, storing, protecting, and processing of the data received by an organization. This is mainly done to ensure the data is accessible, reliable, and timely. Within the hospital, there is an electronic health record (EHR) system. However, the system has not been fully implemented within the hospital. Departments like laboratory and radiology are still using their own independent system that synchronizes data with the EHR every hour. Therefore, all the laboratory test results and radiology results are not readily available once they are uploaded into the system. In order to overcome this challenge, the hospital staff are forced to use manual results as they await the synchronization of the results in the system. The manual process is not recommended since it causes loss of data (Groves, Kayyali, Knott, & Kuiken, 2016). The data that is captured in the EHR is keyed in at the receiving desk of the patient. This is then verified before it is uploaded on to the servers. The verification process is only done to ensure that all the required fields have been filled out and there is no counter checking to ensure that the correct data has been inserted. Once the data is within the system, the data will follow the patient wherever they...
All data is securely stored and can only be accessed by an authorized individual.
Existing Gaps and Issues
One of the gaps that are existing is that the system has not been rolled out to the whole organization. This makes it hard for information sharing and the hospital is forced to rely on manual processes for some of the departments. The risk of data loss become apparent since the two systems are not capturing the same patient data and transferring the data from one system to the other is challenging. This has forced the hospital administrators to request the laboratory and radiology department to only enter patient name and results into their respective systems. In essence, there is a loss of data since the results do not show the tests that the patient underwent. With all the data that the hospital collects regarding patients, it should be used to improve on the services they render to patients (Andreu-Perez, Poon, Merrifield, Wong, & Yang, 2015). Since this is an inpatient hospital, the data can be used to determine the areas where the hospital can make improvements in terms of care delivery. However, the hospital only uses the data for patient management and there is no analysis that is done. This could be attributed to the EHR system itself that does not allow for in-depth analysis to be done on the data…
