A Report of an AMIA Special Task Force, Coursework Example

Introduction

Every healthcare organization deserves to have a working system that allows it to operate according to social expectation. As noted, healthcare institutions are expected to provide the needed care for the society based on individual and communal needs of the people. It is then understood that creating a working system of keeping and distributing files about patients and other healthcare operations undergone by the institution is a serious concern that healthcare administrators need to put their attention into. Having a working system that is fully operated under proper management allows the administrators to oversee the situation and be more involved in directing operations for the betterment of the response to values that the stakeholders of the organization basically give attention to.

In the presentation that follows, the case of Apollo Medical Center shall be given specific consideration. This case is based on a scenario that entails the creation of a good program that aims to support an already effective system that conditionally provides the organization with proper guidance on how it serves the needs of the patients. Consistently, it has been recorded that AMC does have a strongly established system of keeping records of patients and other medical-related files that the organization is basically upon especially in measuring their performance and other points of improvement that they might still embrace in the future. However, as the rate of the patients they serve every year increases, it is but right to make sure that the existing system be adapted into an electronically defined operation that would make it much easier for the administrators to see through the operations that the organization undergoes within a specific span of time.

Case-Background

Apollo Medical Center has been well-known for its capacity to provide high-end service to patients from within and outside its existing community. It could be analyzed that somehow, the said aspect of development in the organization allows it to embrace a rather important role in establishing a new essence of improved operation especially in handling the rising number of patients needing the attention of the staff that the institution has. It should be noted though that without good management, some healthcare facilities would simply resort to hiring more personnel in order to meet the growing need of the establishment to serve the rising number of patients in the area.

The current system used by AMC is a written-based reporting operation. The records are kept in paper and only a few are encoded into the existing computer program that the organization uses. The reason behind such inkling to the old-fashioned paper-and-pen operation is more likely driven by the fact that establishing a centralized system for recording and referencing does require a complex system of programing; one that needs to be fully operational and as much as possible should be flawless in design. What makes up such a system paradigm? The sections that shall follow would present the response to such issue in the aim of making it easier for the analysis and resolution of the problem to recognized and realized accordingly. Noticeably, it is then aimed by AMC to make sure that the program it is to embrace later on would provide it with the competence it needs to reserve the proper assumption of improvement that it needs to embrace especially in the hope of fully realizing its capacity to serve even more individuals without necessarily needing an additional force of individuals to handle the extra influx of patients coming in for attention and assistance.

Problem Statement

While record-keeping is the primary issue of concern in this case, the program to be made and implemented is expected to do more than just record the data that the patients provide. Instead, it is also expected to improve the competence of the staff members of the establishment especially in making sure that they are well-aware of what is happening and is capable of handling the pressure that s presented to them in relation to their role as healthcare assistants. In sudden situations when a relative influx of patients occurs, it could be understood that a definite course of commotion among personnel could basically cause the whole system of operation to crumble [which later on could create problems for the staff members]. When situations occur, it would be much helpful to have an established system that would assign personnel within their area of expertise, allowing them to become more of the help that they need to be in order to attend to patient-needs more effectively.

Listed herein then are some of the primary problems faced by AMC that shall be resolved through the creation and the assumption of a new computer-based program that would respond to the record keeping and protection needs of the institution:

• Keeping up with the rising number of patients served by the institution each year
• Redefining the course of record management that could be used for better patient-centered-service operations in the institution.
• Realigning the attention of the managers and the staff members towards a more effective system of patient-care assistance operations
• Improving staff-to-patient connections that improve the ways by which the institution is able to embrace a new mark of development especially in defining how the staff members take on their role as patient-assistants accordingly.

These problems are to serve as distinct source of guideline as to how the program being implied is to be designed in accordance with the desire to make its function more centralized and easy to control for the assigned administrators and supervisors in each time.

Project Proposal

Goals of Application

The program to be made is expected to meet the following goals that are dedicated towards aligning the attention of the administrators towards effective patient-care services. These goals could be noted as follows:

• the program is to be centralized; operating within an existing server that is able to define the condition of the organization and its capacity to serve patients based on the data encoded into the database.
• The program is noted to give high consideration over the need to assign the right individuals for the right emergency cases therefore reducing the time of medical operations and attention needed by each patient.
• The program is to allow for medical update recording that is highly needed by medical practitioners as these data would be used as reference for the continuing attention that the patients would need may they be admitted or considered as outpatient.
• The program is supposed to give distinct information needed by the administrators especially in times of needing immediate response to mass-emergency cases.

These goals are primarily defined to make a distinct impact on how the current [effective] system of recording that AMC depends upon is adapted into an e-system that is aided within a computer-network designed to assist several departments of AMC to access the information that is kept within the database as the patients are being passed on from one particular department to another. This way, the point of diagnosis towards the point of treatment and recovery that is dedicated to assist each patient to improve well would be much easier to handle and much effective to consider. Patients are then to be given careful attention in order to make sure that their needs are attended to accordingly; as promised by the goals and the missions of the organization.

Aspects of Issues to Resolve

Depending on the case being defined and analyzed, it is expected that the issues of record-keeping would resolve a whole lot of different problems that the organization has to deal with in relation to the continuously rising rate of individuals that needs the organization’s attention. What constitutes a good sense of identifying proper operations management in any healthcare facility such as AMC includes the need to be able to assign the right specialists and healthcare assistants to individuals needing specific care especially during emergencies.  This then requires the program to have a specific feature; one that allows the organization pinpoint specialists as immediate as possible when their attention is needed by patients who are undergoing emergency situations. This way, the medical cases would be easily resolved and more individuals would be given the proper attention to.

Program Features

As mentioned earlier, the primary feature of the program would be dedicated on creating a database where patient-information would be stored for the sake of storing and future referencing. Besides keeping the record of the patients intact, it is also expected that names of specialists are recorded at another sector of the program. This will make it easier for service-managers to easily assign specialists to individuals who are needing their attention [this works well with every special cases that need specific attention and response from particular medical practitioners].

Another feature of the program would be that of the allotment of space for immediate update on the case progress of each patient. It is understood that through this point of improvement, it would be easier for nurses to tag in particular updates on what has been done with the patient as they are admitted into the emergency room [or later on be admitted for further medical attention] and take note on how their progress could be tracked by the specialists attending to their needs.

Trial and Error Analysis

The trial and error analysis for the program shall be undergone within the first two weeks of applying the program into actual work. AMC personnel are then to be trained to handle the program’s basic operations and are to be given the chance to test-trial the program for the first three days in order to check for bugs and other possible malfunctions. This period will allow for programmers to be aware of what needs to be changed through time in order to make sure that the program would work well during the actual rise of population in the emergency area.

Bugs and other problems ought to be fixed immediately; hence a close observation process is to be taken into account during the first two weeks of applying the program within the overall operation of AMC. With this observation process, not only will the mistakes be noted, but also the overall worth of the program to the organization’s operation could be better identified well. Noticeably, trial-and-error operations would best equip the programmers with the information they need in order to make sure that the system operates with full-efficiency especially in mandating a good sense of what is meant by full-operation when time-crunch occurs in the facility as patient-population pours in during the busy days.

Recommendations

The needs of AMC are noted to be rather concentrated on improving patient-attention and service. Nevertheless, in the future, it is expected that such needs would be redefined accordingly. In instances like this, it would be best to understand that AMC’s competence in furthering its services to attend to patient-needs would be more effective in the instance by which the customization of the program would be undergone regularly as the need arises. This constitutes a more defined understanding on how the operations of the organization could be aligned well in order to make a definite turn on how the considerations over patient-care is improved.

In the long-run, it is expected that the current features of the program would not be fully useful anymore. Nonetheless, these programs could be re-customized for the sake of determining a much better pattern of improvement; one that would fully respond to the organization’s needs as the demands of the individuals being served in the community also changes through time. Constant maintenance and backing up of files is necessary. It is then safe to add into the proposal of the program paradigm to create both an offline and online systems back-up operation that would fully attest to the needs of the patients, the staff members of AMC, the supervisors and the administrators as the need to provide excellent patient care remains fully recognized as the main function of the organization in the society.

Works Cited

Goodman, K. W.; Berner, E. S.; Dente, M. A.; Kaplan, B.; Koppel, R.; Rucker, D.; Sands, D. Z.; Winkelstein, P.; Amia Board Of Directors (2010). “Challenges in ethics, safety, best practices, and oversight regarding HIT vendors, their customers, and patients: A report of an AMIA special task force“. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 18 (1): 77–81.

Ash, J. S.; Sittig, D. F.; Poon, E. G.; Guappone, K.; Campbell, E.; Dykstra, R. H. (2007). “The Extent and Importance of Unintended Consequences Related to Computerized Provider Order Entry”. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 14 (4): 415–23.

Wager, K.; Lee, F.; Glaser, J. (2009). Health Care Information Systems: A Practical Approach for Health Care Management (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. pp. 253–254.