Cite three reputable references to support your assignment (e.g., trade or industry publications, government or agency websites, scholarly works, or other sources of similar quality).

MHA/599

03/30/2020

Maire Simington

Processes at Healthcare in the City of Joshua Tree

Introduction

The current healthcare systems are faced with several problems, many of which have been tackled but continue to mutate into other forms. Technology has been the backbone of the majority of solutions to healthcare problems. Some of these solutions have been used to enhance service delivery in terms of information management, while others have been used to improve treatment options available like disease diagnosis. The state of healthcare in Joshua Tree City, as earlier reported, is stable and only needs a few improvements of here and there. Given that the suggested improvement involves a comprehensive roll-out of mental health to address the increasing cases of mental illness in the city. Given the sophisticated nature of the project -which involves massive grassroots implementation spearheaded by local government public health departments, there are three identified processes that will be implemented alongside to enable efficiency in service delivery as well as enhancing treatment options. These three processes include Electronic Medical Record/ Electronic Health Record (EMR/HER), e-Prescribing, and Referral generation and management.

Electronic Medical Record/ Electronic Health Record

In past years, medical care has gone through monumental transformations, given the complexity characterizing the problems in healthcare. Several technologies have been used to address these problems. One of the most popular technologies in healthcare has been the Electronic Medical Record and Electrical Health Record. These two technologies have a big role to play in the role out of mental health, Joshua Tree City.

Electronic Medical Record

An electronic medical record can be described as a digitized version of the traditional manual filing system of medical records. EMR serves purposes such as a systemic collection of patient health records using digital technologies to store them for easy retrieval. The following are some of the benefits that the health system in the city will benefit from after the implementation of the EMR. Enhancement of the overall quality of care within the practice offers a given time track on data, consumes less space as well as administrative resources, and easy identification of due patients for preventive screenings and checkups (Henry et al., 2016). Others include the provision of support for an array of discrete care activities, including laboratory ordering, electronic subscribing, monitoring, amongst others. An EMR also will issue accurate, up to date, rapidly retrievable information sources regardless of the place and time as long as the correct procedures of doing so are adhered to. One major challenge with the EMR is that information does not move easily from where they are stored to where they might be needed for use. The handlers must print them for sharing, thus reducing the technology to more or less the same as the traditional file system of keeping records (Shickel et al., 2017). For this reason, a more advanced version of EMR came into play; that is Electronic Health Record (EHR).

Electronic Health Record

The EHR purposefully came to do what the EMR could not do; that is to collect patient information and securely store them or share them across various healthcare organizations in line with standards and procedures put in place. This will particularly enable the city’s mental healthcare program to receive information related to cases locally present and find better ways of handling them. At the end of the day, the city’s mental healthcare will mark significant improvements across all local governments. Some of the common patient information occasionally captured and shared through the EHR include but not limited to progress notes, vital signs, medications, diagnoses, imaging reports, past medical history, allergies, and lab data.

Some of the benefits attributed to this technology include the sharing of multimedia content such as medical imaging results to various destinations using the correct procedures of doing so. It also gives the patient a role to play in the management of their own medication as they can be logging into the record interface and interpret their lab results while also comparing them with previous ones over the last one year or so and do it anytime and from anywhere. The EHR also offers more efficient storage and retrieval of information far much better than what EMR has been offering (Henry et al., 2016). The most important advantage that this technology offers healthcare is the ability to link records to sources of current clinical protocols and related research. On the side of healthcare professionals, the EHR offers the decision support systems which help them with diagnosis and prescription decisions. Finally, EHR brings together different healthcare organizations and help them to automatically share thousands of information and also help them update information while also standardizing off patient care and services.

The Relevance of EHR/EMR in the City’s Mental Healthcare Project

In summary, both the EMR and EHR will play a central role as far as the city’s mental healthcare program is concerned. With the increase of drug abuse problems in the city, cases of mental illnesses are equally expected to go up. Also, the cases are not concentrated in one particular locality but are spread across the jurisdictions of all local authorities in the city. The high numbers of the cases to be dealt with plus problems wider geographical coverage even makes the use of these two technologies more profound. The EMR will serve to collect all relevant patient information and keep them safe for use within each facility while the EHR will integrate all the EMRs in the city, thereby enhancing the management of referrals as well as improved care delivery.

The Workflow Diagram

Figure 1: Local Authority Integrated EMR/EHR for Joshua Tree City's Mental Healthcare

Referral Generation and Management

Another important automated process in that the city’s planned mental healthcare provision will be the Referral Generation and Management system. At the grassroots will be care facilities which will be responsible for the treatment of first occurring cases as well as suspected cases. These facilities will form the first tier of the city’s mental care structure (Naslund et al., 2016). Right on top of them will another tier where one facility will combine four local authority jurisdictions. Finally, there will be two main referral facilities located in Joshua Tree City. These two facilities will be the final referral facilities in the city and will be responsible for referred cases emanating from the second tier facilities. Below is the workflow diagram for the city's Referral Generation and Management.

Patient

Arrives

Signs in on the front desk

Patient Scheduled for diagnosis/prescription

Cleared to go home

Patient was taken to monitoring unit

Patient referred to Level II Care Unit of the city

Patient taken to monitoring unit

Patient referred to final referral

Patient taken to monitoring unit

Patient Cleared to go home

Patient Cleared to go home

e-Prescribing

e-Prescribing is the first growing technology in the healthcare industry because of the advantages it comes, such as the framework that allows physicians to write and send prescriptions to a participating pharmacy through electronic means. The technology discourages the use of handwritten as well as faxing prescriptions. Although consensus on the impacts of e-prescribing, preliminary assessment of the city’s mental healthcare project issues an indication that it will be instrumental.

References

Henry, J., Pylypchuk, Y., Searcy, T., & Patel, V. (2016). Adoption of electronic health record systems among US non-federal acute care hospitals: 2008–2015. ONC data brief, 35, 1-9.

Naslund, J. A., Aschbrenner, K. A., Marsch, L. A., & Bartels, S. J. (2016). The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media. Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 25(2), 113-122.

Shickel, B., Tighe, P. J., Bihorac, A., & Rashidi, P. (2017). Deep EHR: a survey of recent advances in deep learning techniques for electronic health record (EHR) analysis. IEEE Journal of biomedical and health informatics, 22(5), 1589-1604.