Problem
Allen hospital’s mission is to provide quality patient care, but inept and poor infrastructure reduces the EHR efficacy in the hospital. The inefficient EHR system reduces clinical workflow due to low staff training. Moreover, the inefficient EHR cannot protect patient information in digital databases and violates confidentiality and privacy laws.
The stakeholders play a crucial role in optimizing the organization’s performance. The inefficient EHR system affects the IT, executive leaders, medical personnel, and finance departments. Data privacy breaches reduce patient satisfaction levels in healthcare settings, and the patient volume reduces, affecting an organization’s financial status. It also leads to medical and administrative personnel burnout, which further affects the organization’s performance. Poor electronic health records (EHR) can lead to several repercussions, so stakeholders work collaboratively to resolve the identified risks (Kaihlanen et al., 2020).
The EHR system can result in medical errors like medication errors, incorrect diagnoses, and treatment plans that reduce health outcomes, as the Leapfrog data labeled Allen Hospital’s Grade “C” in this regard (Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, 2019). Additionally, breaches of patient health information due to poorly designed EHR systems lead to severe repercussions on the healthcare organization, and they may face legal action. Inadequately maintained EHR systems may also frequently go down, causing delays in patient care that leads to negative patient outcomes, as informed by Medicare comparison. Allen hospital showed a 3-star patient survey rating as compared to the other two hospitals in the same locality such as Sartori Memorial Hospital (SMH) and Mercyone Waterloo Medical Center (MWMC) (Medicare., 2023). It also increased the workload for healthcare professionals and healthcare costs due to the lower standard of care provided to patients.
The vision is to enhance patient health outcomes to achieve financial success at Allen Hospital. The proposed solution is to implement the latest technology, such as an advanced EHR system, to increase the interoperability of the healthcare setting. Educational training will be provided to the personnel about EHR use to implement the solution. Furthermore, financial resources will be needed to incorporate the latest software, such as Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and Patient identification system (Beauvais et al., 2020). The planning for material and financial resources is necessary to implement the proposed solution in the healthcare setting. An electronic health record (EHR) system is used in healthcare settings to collect, store, retrieve, and analyze patient data. Healthcare professionals should use EHRs properly to enhance the standard and security of patient care (Gariépy-Saper et al., 2021). To produce and organize electronic health records, EHRs function as an informatics solution and rely on a combination of networking, software, and hardware technologies.
EHRs intend to increase patient care’s quality and safety by giving authorized healthcare providers complete patient health information. Additionally, they enable data analytics to enhance population health and support care coordination among various providers and patients (Vos et al., 2020). EHR adoption and effective use enhance interoperability, data security, and privacy in healthcare settings.