Final Project: Implementation Assessment of Electronic Health Record.
Objective:
For this assignment, you will create the assessment to implement the new HER in a Health care setting. The assessment phase is foundational to all other EHR implementation steps, and involves determining if the practice is ready to make the change from paper records to electronic (EHRs), or to upgrade their current system to a new certified version. You will be encourage to choose a Community Health Center or a Doctor’s Office. The Assessment is designed because our world has been radically transformed by digital technology – smart phones, tablets, and web-enabled devices have transformed our daily lives and the way we communicate. Medicine is an information-rich enterprise. A greater and more seamless flow of information within a digital health care infrastructure, created by electronic health records (EHRs), encompasses and leverages digital progress and can transform the way care is delivered and compensated. With EHRs, information is available whenever and wherever it is needed.
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, a component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, represents the Nation’s first substantial commitment of Federal resources to support the widespread adoption of EHRs. As of August 2012, 54 percent of the Medicare- and Medicaid-eligible professionals had registered for the meaningful use incentive program.
The paper will be 8-10 pages long. More information and due date will provide in the assignments link.
ASSIGNMENT GUIDELINES (2 points /10%):
The assessment should look at the current state of the practice:
- Are administrative processes organized, efficient, and well documented?
- Are clinical workflows efficient, clearly mapped out, and understood by all staff?
- Are data collection and reporting processes well established and documented?
- Are staff members computer literate and comfortable with information technology?
- Does the practice have access to high-speed internet connectivity?
- Does the practice have access to the financial capital required to purchase new or additional hardware?
- Are there clinical priorities or needs that should be addressed?
- Does the practice have specialty specific requirements?
Through the Regional Extension Centers (RECs), we’ve learned that these questions and assessment tools provide a good understanding of the current state of the practice and can help identify key goals for improvement. Often, these goals relate to patient quality, patient satisfaction, practice productivity and efficiency, improved quality of work environment, and most important to the overall goal – improved health care.
EACH PAPER SHOULD INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:
1. Introduction (5 points / 25%) Offer an abstract that provide a brief outlook of the proposal and explaining in your own words what is meant by a Electronic Health Record for a Health care Facility.
2. Your Implementation Assessment of Electronic Health Record. Plan (10 points 50%)
a. Presentation Page:
PROJECT NAME
ORGANIZATION NAME
BUSINESS ADDRESS
CITY, ST, ZIP
TELEPHONE NUMBER
FACSIMILE NUMBER
WEBSITE ADDRESS
EMAIL ADDRESS
b. Envision the Future
The next EHR implementation step is to envision the future state of the practice. What would the practice leadership like to see different in the future? More specifically:
- What will be different for the patients?
- What will be different for the providers?
- What will be different for the staff?
c. Set Goals
Goals and needs should be documented to help guide decision-making throughout the implementation process. And they may need to be re-assessed throughout the EHR implementation steps to ensure a smooth transition for the practice and all staff.
We recommend that you set goals in areas that are important and meaningful to your practice. These may be clinical goals, revenue goals, or goals around work environment. Goals in all three areas will help assure balanced processes after the implementation. Goals that are important to you will help you and your staff through the change process. We recommend you follow the “SMART” goals process. This process includes setting objectives and goals that meet the following criteria:
- Specific – Achieving the goal would make a difference for our patients and our practice
- Measureable – We can quantify the current level and the target goal
- Attainable – Although the goal may be a stretch, we can achieve it
- Relevant – This is worth the effort
- Time bound – There are deadlines and opportunities to celebrate success!
These goals become the guide posts for an EHR implementation project, and achieving these goals will motivate providers and practice staff to make necessary changes and attain new skills.
d. Plan Your Approach
Clarify and Prioritize
Building an EHR implementation plan becomes critical for identifying the right tasks to perform, the order of those tasks, and clear communication of tasks to the entire team involved with the change process. One effective first step in the planning process is for the team to segment tasks into three categories:
- What new work tasks/process are we going to start doing?
- What work tasks/process are we going to stop doing?
- What work tasks/process are we going to sustain?
The start/stop/sustain exercise helps clarify what the new work environment will be like after the change and help the team prioritize tasks in the overall EHR implementation plan.
Steps in the Planning Phase
Here are some tactical steps that typically occur during the EHR implementation planning phase. You may collaborate and use tools provided by your Regional Extension Center (REC), IT vendor, and/or EHR vendor (if you already have an existing EHR product) to complete these activities.
- Analyze and map out the practice’s current workflow and processes of how the practice currently gets work done (the current state).
- Map out how EHRs will enable desired workflows and processes, creating new workflow patterns to improve inefficiency or duplicative processes (the future state).
- Create a contingency plan – or back-up plan – to combat issues that may arise throughout the implementation process.
- Create a project plan for transitioning from paper to EHRs, and appoint someone to manage the project plan.
- Establish a chart abstraction plan, a means to convert or transform, information from paper charts to electronic charts. Identify specific data elements that will need to be entered into the new EHR and if there are items that will be scanned.
- Understand what data elements may be migrated from your old system to your new one, such as patient demographics or provider schedule information. Sometimes, being selective with which data or how much data you want to migrate can influence the ease of transition.
- Identify concerns and obstacles regarding privacy and security and create a plan to address them. It is essential to emphasize the importance of privacy and security when transitioning to EHRs.
e. Achieve Meaningful Use
The Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs provide a financial incentive for achieving “meaningful use“, which is the use of certified EHR technology to achieve health and efficiency goals. This section provides an overview of the Stage 1 and Stage 2 EHR meaningful use core and menu objectives for eligible professionals (EPs) as outlined by CMS – which are intended to set a baseline for electronic data capture and information sharing.
The meaningful use objectives are grouped into five patient-driven domains that relate to health outcomes policy priorities. As depicted in the dashboards below, each core and menu objective is aligned to one of the following domains:
- Improve Quality, Safety, Efficiency
- Engage Patients & Families
- Improve Care Coordination
- Improve Public and Population Health
- Ensure Privacy and Security for Personal Health Information
3. Conclusion (3 points / 15%)
Briefly recapitulate your thoughts & conclusion to Your Implementation Assessment of Electronic Health Record. Plan. How did this plan impact your thoughts on Health Care Administrator and Health Information System?
Evaluation will be based on how clearly you respond to the above, in particular:
a) The clarity with which you associate, relates, stablish and apply your knowledge to generate the Implementation Assessment of Electronic Health Record Plan.
b) The Complexity, depth, scope, Profundity and organization of your paper; and,
c) Your conclusions, including a description of the impact of the Electronic Health Record on any Health Care Setting.
