Strategic Planning for Valley View Hospital System
For one to come up with a strategic plan for Valley View Hospital System, it will be important to evaluate
the current status of their information systems and their preparedness for going a complete EHR system.
The hospital system is made up of two facilities with different health information systems that are not
tightly linked which leads to poor performance and high costs of maintenance.
Analysis of the Current Situation
Valley View Hospital System targets a population of about 200,000 and has two hospitals with 120 and
100 beds each. Some functionalities include registration, nursing notes, and physician order entry, and
the two facilities use systems from a vendor called Cerner. However, these systems are somewhat
obsolete and non-integrated, leading to high personnel expenses and no scale economies. The support
systems like clinical laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, and diet also vary from one hospital to another,
making it even harder to extract and consolidate data.
Information Theory Application
Analysis based on information theory is carried out by examining the inputs, processing, outputs, and
overall utilization of data across the hospital’s information systems (Alolayyan et al., 2020). At the
moment, the inputs are patient registration details, nursing notes and medication orders. The potential
outputs, therefore, would include comprehensive and integrated patient records that could be accessed
by both facilities to enhance patient care. However, the fragmented systems do not allow effective use of
data across business processes and processes used to assess the quality of care.
Necessary Information for Strategic Plan
When developing a strategic plan for Valley View Hospital System, there is a need to assess the strengths
and weaknesses of the current system. Furthermore, identify the technical and functional specifications
for achieving complete EHR implementation and conduct an economic analysis to determine whether it
is more suitable to upgrade to a single system or maintain the current systems (Ridgely et al., 2020).
Also, the study of requirements and expectations of the major stakeholders, such as healthcare
providers, administrative staff, and patients, as well as healthcare standards compliance, is crucial.
Accumulating this data, the consulting team can improve the found weaknesses, consolidate the existing
systems, and improve the level of patient' care.
References
Ridgely, M. S., Buttorff, C., Wolf, L. J., Duffy, E. L., Tom, A. K., Damberg, C. L., ... & Vaiana, M. E. (2020). The
importance of understanding and measuring health system structural, functional, and clinical
integration. Health Services Research, 55, 1049-1061.
Alolayyan, M. N., Alyahya, M. S., Alalawin, A. H., Shoukat, A., & Nusairat, F. T. (2020). Health information
technology and hospital performance the role of health information quality in teaching
hospitals. Heliyon, 6(10).
