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Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) acquire this status when they meet the criteria of delivering coordinated care and improved quality of care that enhances patient experience and safety. Healthcare organizations must integrate strategies and processes that promote quality improvement in healthcare services. This assessment entails a quality improvement proposal for Sacred Heart Hospital of Vila Health to acquire accreditation of ACO by improving its technological infrastructure and expanding the hospital’s health information technologies. This will be needed to include quality metrics that organizations can evaluate and assess to comprehend the quality of care delivered to patients.
Health information technologies (HIT) can improve the quality of care within SHH by enhancing care coordination and facilitating communication among interprofessional team members. When adequate communication technologies are integrated within healthcare organizations, healthcare providers can efficiently and timely share patient health data, preventing treatment delays and medical or treatment errors (Qadri et al., 2020). ACOs also leverage technology within their healthcare systems to enhance care coordination in delivering high-quality care treatments to patients and meet quality metrics to maintain their accreditation.
Integrating HIT within SHH and improving currently outdated Electronic Health Records (EHRs) can improve quality. This can be done by integrating specific features within the EHR system to capture and track the quality metrics, such as medication errors, patient falls, patient satisfaction scores, and mortality rates. Enhancing EHR systems will help monitor these quality metrics efficiently and ensure the quality of care delivered (Maziarz et al., 2022).
Automated reporting processes can also be developed to extract relevant data for quality metrics. This will allow IT health professionals who can develop the software to automate the data extraction process to draw patient health data for regularly evaluating quality metrics (Hadasik & Kubiczek, 2021). Ultimately, SHH’s quality control department can monitor performance trends and lessen the quality of care.
The HIT can be further expanded to integrate computerized Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) to prompt medical personnel about recommended diagnostic tests and preventive screenings to promote preventive care at SHH and improve the standard of care. This will result in efficient and coordinated care for patients unable to undergo diagnostic tests, including mammograms or colonoscopies when CDSS can identify risk stratification using data analytics and stratification tools (Kwan et al., 2020).
NURS FPX 6612 Assessment 2 Quality Improvement Proposal
Community health information can be tracked in several ways to improve the quality of care, such as conducting surveys and outreach programs to collect information on community health needs and preferences (Stopa et al., 2020).Moreover, establishing a community Health Information Exchange (HIE) will enable healthcare professionals to acquire relevant health information across different healthcare entities.
One study showed that the use of HIE by clinicians helped reduce emergency visits by 53% and hospital readmission rates by 61% (Aagard et al., 2023). Another approach that can allow the aggregation and analysis of health information from diverse sources within the community is population health management tools. These include EHRs that can provide previous health record of patients and give health and disease patterns in community (Martyn et al., 2022).
Lastly, the SHH can incorporate the role of informatics in nursing care coordination by training and educating nursing staff on informatics tools. These tools allow healthcare professionals, mainly nurses, to streamline workflows and measure healthcare outcomes effectively. Quality metrics like improved patient outcomes reduced hospital readmission rates and enhanced patient satisfaction serve as tangible indicators of the positive impact of nurse informaticists in expanding HIT across healthcare organizations (Ye, 2020). The expansion of HIT within the organization will ultimately enable it to acquire ACO accreditation by following the earlier strategies.
Issues
Expanding an organization’s health information technologies to incorporate quality metrics within SHH requires careful consideration of several issues, including lack of integration for quality metrics, ineffective data standardization, and limited automation in reporting processes. As SHH’s
EHR is outdated, healt
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