CIS450 Assignment Mod 8:

Running Head: TECHNOLOGY APPLICATION IN HEALTHCARE 1

TECHNOLOGY APPLICATION IN HEALTHCARE 7

Technology application in healthcare

Jadiam Lopez

Aspen University

Dr. Bonny Kehm

CIS450

08/07/2020

Introduction

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is a digitalized healthcare chart used in hospitals to facilitate the digital recording of the crucial administrative, clinical information on the patients' health. EHRs are maintained by an authorized provider to ensure that the health facility's critical data is not tampered with by an unauthorized person. The EHRs are also structured to smooth the sharing of information between the health personnel and the concerned patient. The EHRs also enhance data sharing among the health providers to better the services to the patients. The patients’ history records in the EHRs allow health care provides to integrate evidence-based treatment to improve patients' management.

Q1.1

Most recent medical research shows that, despite the EHRs designed to improve the healthcare provision in hospitals, most healthcare personnel are over concentrating on the EHRs charts, which provide information in a more straightforward way than focusing on the patients' needs during treatments. In the current clinical training institution, academic electronic health records have been incorporated in the learning process to provide clinical students with the knowledge to handle EHRs during their careers. Academic EHRs software is designed to allow clinical students with expertise to record information on the EHRs charts, view and interpret data recorded. The students are also equipped with the skill to explain images, laboratory procedures, and crucial information in the EHRs is shared among the key stakeholders.

Therefore, training is sufficient for the use of EHRs through academic EHRs, and the skills required by a medical professional is also enough on the use of EHRs. Still, the main challenge of healthcare providers concentrating on the computer data than the patient is poor computer system design, which overemphasizes the documentation (Shickel, Tighe, Bihorac & Rashidi, 2017). The EHRs and academic EHRs should be redesigned to facilitate a secure method of entering data to enable the healthcare personnel to use the little time on documentation and much time concentrating on the treatment of the patient.

EHRs should be redesigned to provide a time limit for documentation of the patient’s data to prevent time wastage on the EHRs rather than the patient's welfare. Academic EHRs also should give a sub-course on time management to ensure students are equipped with knowledge on how to manage time between a patients’ healthcare well-being and the documentation in the EHRs during their career.

Q1.2

Due to the troublesome user interface used in EHRs has contributed tremendously to the healthcare personnel's burnout. The EHRs demands a considerable time used for clerical-oriented information entry. Healthcare providers working in EHRs spend less time communicating with their clients. Hence, leading to low satisfaction decreases the quality of the client's medical care and increases the stress of the patient. A patient's health is compromised, where the patients are not given a forum to communicate their health critical condition verbally, which later lowers the quality of health provision. It is more frustrating to a patient when there is no eye contact with the doctor who is busy looking at a computer instead of the patient.

Q1.3

Additionally, EHRs provide charts that accommodate fewer details on the patient's healthcare information since EHRs contain clicking boxes for data recording. The boxes hinder healthcare professionals from recording all the necessary information regarding a patient. In case of a lawsuit, a health provider may be fined handsomely for lack of evidence in a court hearing.

Q2.1

In my medical practice, Never Events has been a problem over the years. According to the statement provided by the National Quality Forum (NQF), never events are medical faults which are made by healthcare providers. The errors are identifiable and preventable, and if not well managed, they compromise the health of a patient. Hence, Never Events is a severe challenge of the healthcare facility, which compromises the credibility and safety of quality healthcare provision. Although the actual number of never events has not been established, they lead to fatality up to ninety-eight thousand people per year worldwide, according to research done by the Institute of Medical (IOM).

The never events consist of foreign objects been left in the patient's body after surgery; surgery is done on the body part, which was not intended and unmatched blood transfusion. In my practice, information is being tracked over a patient whose surgery was done on the left kidney instead of the right kidney. The patient concerned realized that the error occurred and has decided to file a lawsuit to sue the doctor in charge and the healthcare facility for failing to provide him with the services required. As a result, both the two kidneys are not functioning, forcing the organization to track all the information, which led to the wrong surgery.

Q2.2

It is essential to track all the data that led to the wrong surgery to create a culture of continuous monitoring of the patient's well-being within the healthcare facility. Moreover, tracking the data enables a healthcare organization to identify opportunities and challenges to improve the quality of the healthcare provision by educating each healthcare personnel on the preventive measures to be undertaken to avoid never events in the future.

Q2.3

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is the organization tracking the information on the wrong surgery done. CMS is an organization within the United States under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that register major national healthcare programs. The organization has multiple duties, including collecting and analyzing healthcare data, providing timely reports within the concerned healthcare facilities and working hand in hand with other healthcare organizations to prevent abuse and fraud within the healthcare facility.

Q2.4

There is an ethical concern when an external organization does an investigation on the Never Event. The most unethical issue is that the hospital concerned ended up hiding crucial information on the doctor who has made a mistake. In the year 2012, in Michigan, an eighty-one older woman died two years after wrong brain surgery (Davidson, Dunton & Christopher, 2009). The patient was suffering from temporomandibular joint (TM) disorder where she required a jaw surgery. She visited a hospital in Oakwood, MI, to relieve pain. While in the hospital, the healthcare staff made an error by putting the patient's name into another patient's treatment scan record.

Instead of jaw surgery, the surgeons drilled two holes through the skull into her brain and removed the right part of the skull before the surgeons realized the mistake. The woman died afterword after been placed in a life support machine. During the external investigation, the hospital failed to disclose all the information concerning the surgery. The hospital also failed to disclose critical data to the State of Michigan and the family making the external investigation on the matter complicated. Therefore, the main unethical issue when an outside organization is Never tracking Events, the internal health personnel hide relevant data to safeguard health providers from been charged in a court of law.

Q3.1

My project is on healthcare data management, which involves the correction of the data in the healthcare facility, recovery, appropriate storage, and the use of the information to facilitate accurate data while safeguarding my integrity as the healthcare provider. Effective and efficient information management helps an organization to be informed in the decision making. For one to implement a good data management structure, need planning. The data management and the organization strategy should strike a balance. The organization must put into consideration which data is crucial for recording and analyzing.

To realize the full value of the data management, the resources and tools to manage the program should be put into consideration. Several stakeholders are vital to the success of the data management, whom they include clients or employees. Systems analysts facilitate the users with information that should be recorded and correct the data. The computer programmers will design the database, a platform that allows information recording, accessible analysis of the information, and retrieving the data when required for decision making. Computer programmers should also design programs that will instruct the computer to collect the data. In case the health facility is large enough, the data administrators are also crucial since they are meant to ensure that all the maintenance of the database is regularly updated. The other essential service in data management is the data warehouse.

Data warehouse stores and analyze information from a different database, which facilitates the response of different questions. Data management also requires installing protective firewall applications to ensure data storage is secure from interference by an unauthorized third party (Dimitrov, 2019). The benefits and costs are considered in the data management, and therefore healthcare organizations need to invest in the data storage system, personnel to manage the program and software. Data management is crucial in healthcare organizations, particularly in case of lawsuit file by a patient but on the other hand, labor and cost-intensive.

Q3.2

The data management project is aligned with the health theory of the Information Communication Model. The theory emphasizes the exploitation of advanced technology to enable secure information handling in the healthcare organization. It involves applying technology and science in the processing of data retrieval, personnel-computer interrelationship, and data management within the computer system.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a healthcare facility should invest in the current advancement in technology. The application of the technology, particularly in data management, has resulted in fast retrieving data in case of a lawsuit filed by the patient. Technology is labor and cost-intensive, but benefits are long-lasting.

References

Davidson, J., Dunton, N., & Christopher, A. (2009). Following the trail: Connecting unit characteristics with never events. Nursing Management, 40(2), 15-19.

Dimitrov, D. V. (2019). Blockchain applications for healthcare data management. Healthcare informatics research, 25(1), 51-56.

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.