Professional, Ethical & Regulatory Standards in Designing and Implementation of the System

 

It is essential to consider different ethical, professional, and regulatory requirements and standards in designing and implementing the EHRs system. Professional standards entail requirements set by professional associations that guide decisions of nurse practitioners in different settings. The American Nurses Association emphasizes the need for safety and positive patient outcomes in deploying information technologies in health care (Balestra, 2017). The association asserts that informatics nurses should ensure data accuracy and proficiency when collecting, storing, scrutinizing, and reporting information. Ethical principles are also essential and consist of different areas related to privacy, confidentiality, and security. Health care providers must design, execute, and evaluate the EHR system’s use within their health care settings.

The integration of regulatory requirements by existing federal legislation like the Health Information Technology and Clinical Health Act (HITECH and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a critical aspect of compliance. Health care organizations must protect patient’s health data and personal information. Privacy, security, confidentiality requirements should also be considered to attain practical and effective use of electronic health information. The HITECH regulations emphasize the need to comply with HIPAA standards and increase the legal responsibility for entities that fail to comply with set requirements on data use and security.

Order Sets as part of the New Record

Health care entities are deploying evidence-based practices to improve quality care. The use of clinical order sets based on evidence-based guidelines within the EHR system reduces errors and enhances patient outcomes. Consequently, to attain useful and current order sets, the team should incorporate these components into their design. Therefore, to achieve success in this model, get a buy-in from the main stakeholders, and satisfaction from providers, the team needs to have a lead physician’s formal governance structure (Balestra, 2017). Imperatively, clinical order sets should have the best practices and organizational standards that entail identifying and selecting data content sources, reviewing content, and maintaining and updating these resources. The team should establish a process to identify and replace content that can impact patient safety or care quality if the content is not current.

Communicating Changes

Managing change requires the deployment of principles, techniques, and prescriptions that allow people to accept the transition and improve overall implementation. Kotter’s change model is sufficient, and the team must use it to generate leadership and momentum for change. Health care providers may possess different responses to change processes in the organization, as some may accept, while others may require time. Therefore, it is essential to communicate these changes by laying out how the team will roll out the EHR system. The unit can use Kotter’s 8-Step Model to communicate the changes based on the steps that include creating an urgency for transformation, forming a powerful coalition, and developing a vision for the changes. The team should then communicate the vision, remove any hurdles, and create short-term wins while building on the changes (McCororie et al., 2019). Finally, they should incorporate the change as part of their organizational culture. The team can communicate the changes using different layers of communication channels that include banners, posters, and creating flyers and emails to individual practitioners.

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