Primary Care Practice Upgrading to a Current Cutting Edge Health Information Management System

Medical Information System Upgrade Proposal

The information system currently relied upon by this practice is extremely outdated; it is incapable of assuring information security, and highly inefficient. Current information management practices in this office are significantly outdated and will eventually have to be upgraded to maintain any capacity to coordinate with other offices and to process ordinary transaction because digital systems are already the standard throughout modern American healthcare and business more generally (Boyce, 2008).

The potential benefits to the practice of upgrading the medical information system include increasing staff efficiency, reducing cost, increasing information security, and a significant improvement in emergency management planning, the capacity of this practice to recover from unanticipated emergencies, and reduced liability in connection with information security and regulatory compliance (Halbert & Ingulli, 2008; Personick & Patterson, 2007). The potential benefits to staff include increased efficiency and the ability to process and store crucial information in the manner that is already standard in this industry and expected by patients, care providers, insurers, and other stakeholders (Boyce, 2008). Purely from a business competition perspective, it is impossible for any contemporary healthcare practice to function at the same level as comparable practices without an up-to-date information management and communication system.

Currently, our staff spends considerably more time processing, recording, storing, and retrieving basic and essential information than would be necessary with a modern information system and this already undermines our ability to perform our jobs to the highest level and it costs the practice a considerable amount of money in wasted time alone.

The transition to modern information systems will require an initial effort but that effort will pay off in a very short time. The only significant challenge will be transferring existing hard-copy records. Meanwhile, the cost of standard information management systems is relatively insubstantial and will be recouped very quickly by virtue of increased efficiency and time savings alone.

The outdated hard-copy-dependent system upon which this practice currently relies is completely incapable of providing adequate information assurance and business continuity and both of those capabilities are necessary in the modern age (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola, 2010). In the event of any major emergency that threatened the physical security of essential information, this practice would be entirely unable to access copies of any information lost or destroyed unexpectedly. Moreover, the dependence on hard-copy files would all but prevent any timely restoration of business function in an alternate location if necessitated by major emergency or natural disasters.