Electronic medical records implementation in healthcare facilities

Electronic Medical Records

Over the years, with the technological development and digitalization of almost all the processes, there have been calls for the healthcare technology to be adopted in a wider sense of it. This has been mainly on the development of the appropriate chip and other electronic storage systems that can hold the information about each American's medical information and any other relevant data like the physical address and the migration trend if the person moves from one town to another or even across the borders. This has been argued to be aimed at ensuring that the information about the individual is readily available to help in medically assisting the individual incase anything happens. Several methods of fully digitalizing this process have been suggested, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) being one of the major methods thought of.

Purpose of the project

Many healthcare facilities of late turn to this system of keeping records and there is nee for our health canter to adopt this technology as a means to quality improvement imitative for the nursing practice. There are many clients who visit the facility and in line with the HIPAA guidelines, there is need to have clear and accurate records of each client which must also be confidential. The nurses within the facility need also to have ease of access to the medical records when they are contacted by another facility on the medical history of the client or even when the clients make a repeat visit.

Currently the nurses have a great challenge in accessing the medical history of the clients and it takes a lot of time and energy to accomplish only one search particularly if the client visited the facility a long time ago. This project is geared towards eliminating this waste of time and energy and to make the electronic records easy to retrieve. Ball, Weaver & Kiel, (2004) note that in most health facilities, the focus changed in the late 1990s where, after some thorough research on the health facilities, there was change of attention towards supporting the full integration of the healthcare system and the entire clinical process through introduction of technology.

Benefits of the project

According to Robert E. et.al, (1997) there are a number of principals that guide the adoption of IT into institutions and these will guide the benefits that the health facility will derive from this project;

1. To make IT a business-driven line item activity, not a technology-driven staff functions. The adoption of the electronic records will make the facility intergrade IT as a significant part of the heath facility and not a foreign provision that is only borrowed when needed. This will help the health care center be in line with the current IT revolution.

2. IT is also meant to seek results from development efforts and this project will achieve this by continued monitoring and evaluation process that will allow hospital to get return for their investment in the IT.

3. The electronic records will lead to the hospital making funding decisions like other business decisions-on the basis of value. The adoption of the project will lead to annual budgeting consideration hence being an integral part of the daily operation.

4. The project will drive constant year-to-year operational productivity improvements. There is need for the health facility to treat technology as a tool of production and an investment that must bring returns in terms of contributing towards improving productivity.

5. The project is meant to ensure simplicity and flexibility throughout the technology environment. This is a significant factor that the hospital needs to embrace in order to make it easier for each person within the institution to use and benefit from the introduction of the IT.

6. The project seeks to make the IT within the facility relevant, appropriate and contemporary in order to see the meaning of having such functions of the IT as record keeping hence leading to better nursing services.

The cost

The project will significantly affect the entire operations of the nurses within the facility with the aim of improving the quality of service in general within the hospital. The projected startup budget will be $25 million since there will be several servers bought, computers and other related IT components. There is another estimated $2,000 monthly operational costs which will ensure the process runs efficiently and that the nurses are capable of utilizing the services of this platform to offer better services to the clients who visit the facility.

Evaluation of the project

The IT system that will be put in place to enable electronic health records to be stored will have varied users and it will hence be relatively easy to measure the effectiveness of the system in an objective manner. There will be internal evaluation of the project twice each year through questionnaires and analysis of the collected data particularly among the nurses who will be frequently using the system as well as the IT support team.