Information Technology Comes to Medicine, Essay Example

Background Information

Information technology is an important component of the health care setting because it allows health care professionals to rapidly assess, diagnose, and treat patients in a manner that was not possible using paper records. Furthermore, information technology systems in hospitals and independent care settings allow the administrative staff to quickly determine information regarding the staffing and resource available, in addition to allowing easier means of keeping track of billing information and social service data to support their patients’ ability to receive treatment as quickly as possible. Recently, health care institutions across the country have implemented the use of electronic health record (EHR) systems that not only speed up patient access to care, but allows these individuals to gain access to their health care records in a manner that is expected to support their treatment. Therefore, the role of the information technology professional is integral in this setup because these individuals are responsible for assessing the needs of an individual health care organization and then making recommendations and modifications to the EHR system as necessary.

EHR United is an information technology company that acts as a consulting firm to hospitals and independent health care organizations to provide a variety of services related to the implementation of the EHR system. The goal of the organization is to help these businesses assess their needs with regards to the type of software that would be suitable for them, they help these organizations install the systems, and train employees to use these systems. Furthermore, the company provides its clients with software updates in order to accommodate the growing needs of the businesses it serves. While many of the organizations that EHR United serves have their own information technology teams, many hospitals have had difficulty in implementing new systems due to the amount of work needed to establish them in the health care setting. Therefore, these staff members often require specialized training in order to successfully support the needs of the health care professionals in their organization.

Establishing/Identifying Need

There is a growing need for EHR systems as established by local, state, and federal regulatory policies in the health care field. Recently, the government has provided financial incentive to companies who are willing to use the systems, replacing paper record use altogether (Thurston 510). Furthermore, studies have shown that the use of these systems reduce the expenses of the health care organization for many reasons. First, this technology helps reduce the time spent looking for paper records, which allows the health care professional to spend more time with the patient. In addition, these records tend to be more accurate and readable, allowing the professional to be confident about the accuracy and thoroughness of the information read. Finally, these systems help decrease the hospital’s risk with regard to medical error. These combined aspects reduce the expenses of the health care organization because the time usage of employees becomes more efficient, there is decrease cost associated with legal protection needed for cases of medical error, and the hospital is able to use its non-human resources more effectively (Sittig & Singh 1854). Therefore, these aforementioned factors combined with the federal government’s incentive program allow the use of EHR systems to be profitable on many fronts.

Business Case

EHR United has been a successful business because their services are low-risk. The implementation of any EHR system is expected to contribute to an increase of profitability and a reduction of medical errors in the hospitals and health care organizations that utilize these services. Furthermore, there are many hospitals that wish to make the transition from paper based records to electronic records due to government incentives and the benefits that the hospital would gain as a consequence. There is little concern for competition, as the concept of an electronic record consultant firm is relatively new and difficult to establish, indicating that new market entrants will not be effectively competitive. In the past, EHR has received positive reviews from almost all of its clients, which has positively impacted its ability to do business in the Northeast region. EHR has been able to help refine the successes that health care organizations see from the use of the electronic record system because it provides these organizations with personalized software and specialized training programs that help their clients quickly adapt to the use of the system. Furthermore, the organization constantly checks in on these organizations to determine if upgrades or modifications to the system are needed in order to ensure their utility.

EHR United works with many third party vendors that are able to provide the company with a deal for buying their software and computing systems in bulk. The installation of an electronic health record (EHR) system ranges from $15,000 to $70,000 per provider (Blumenthal & Glaser 1). In the hospital setting, this figure should be multiplied by the total number of providers available at the given institution. While individual practitioners will only use 1-5 of these systems depending on the size of their practice, hospitals are likely to acquire more than 100 to ensure that the needs of all of their patients could be met. As a consequence, the discount that the vendors provide the company allows their practices to be very profitable, as the company earns approximately $10,000 for lower cost systems and $50,000 for higher end products.

EHR United delivers its electronic health record systems efficiently, by employing a team proportional to the size of the health care institution to work on the project. When information technology staff members are responsible for the implementation of this type of project, it can take the team six or more months in order to have the system fully operational and to train the staff. However, EHR United promises that these tasks can be accomplished in one month for a small organization and under two months for larger institutions. As a consequence, health care organizations that have their own information technology team tend to use their services for support during this process, but will not rely on them solely for this project. For small organizations, EHR United claims that it will need three weeks to install the systems and to verify their accuracy and one week to train the staff how to use the system. The company will then collect data during the next several months to determine how the efficacy of the hospital has improved following the implementation of this system, which will then be forwarded to the hospital administration to affirm the efficacy of EHR United’s work. For large organizations, EHR uses six weeks to install and to confirm the accuracy of the system and two weeks are used to train the staff. The same follow-up period is used by the company to determine the hospital’s efficiency compared to baseline measurements, and all of this data is collected and analyzed off-site to avoid interference with the hospital’s day to day functionality.

The success of the electronic health record system is determined by EHR United by studying the amount of cases the hospital sees, the amount of time that each health care professional spends with each patient, the number of medical errors conducted, the efficiency of the hospital’s billing process, and the hospital’s profitability if applicable, to determine if the implementation of the electronic health record system has been beneficial to the organization. Over time, this same process will be used to determine whether various changes and interventions to the system will confer a benefit. These interventions are selected in a manner that is consistent with the needs of the health care institution. Information that has been already collected by the system is used to serve as justification for particular changes. For example, if EHR United staff determines that there is no real change with regards to the percentage of medical errors incurred by the health care institution, EHR staff will modify this section of the program to made prior health records more readable or listed in an order that allows the health care professional to see health history and patient medication records more clearly. Furthermore, EHR could pose to solve the problem by providing more thorough training to certain departments as the need arises based on the statistics generated.

EHR United was contracted to install an electronic health record system at ABC hospital, which has 100 physicians and sees 1,000 patients daily. After assessing the needs of the hospital, it was determined that a high efficacy system costing $70,000 would be needed. Since only about 10 physicians are staffed at one time, EHR United and the hospital worked together to conclude that 10 systems should be purchased for a total of $700,000. The organization charged an additional service fee of $300,000 for labor and training, making a total of $1,000,000 in profit for one month of installation and training work in addition to a six month long follow up study of the retrieved data. In order to allow this process to be optimized, ABC hospital provided the organization with the assistance of their five informational technology department members.

Post Production and Review

The installation of the EHR system was successful and all aspects of the project occurred according to the proposed timeline. All business expectations were met and the cost of the project did not exceed $1,000,000. However, during the follow up phase of the project EHR United uncovered a need to optimize the patient billing aspect of the plan, as the insurance companies were not receiving the billing in a timely manner. As a consequence, the traditional SDLC cycle, involving investigating, analyzing, designing, implementing, and maintaining the system, was used to resolve this problem. After an analysis of the system, the information technology team discovered that the connectivity on the end of the insurance companies was not compatible with the electronic health record system. Therefore, instead of forwarding billing information directly to the insurance company’s information system, it was forwarded to them through e-mail to be manually inserted by the medical coders. This problem arose because the electronic health record systems used by most of the health insurance organizations is not as up to date as the system used by ABC hospital. However, this problem has been occurring for many organizations, not just those served by EHR United, so it is expected that the company will contact these organizations in order to fix this incompatible technology problem.

This indicates that the utility of this equipment cannot be complete if different organizations are not able to have compatible equipment. This problem is challenging with regards to sending billing information to insurance companies because this is a normal function of electronic health record systems. However, this problem also arises between health care organizations, as there is often a need to send important patient documents to other health care institutions in order to ensure that the patient is able to receive specialized care. Therefore, it would be useful for EHR United to consider this utility problem and to begin incorporating a compatibility solution into the programs it offers its clients.

Consequences of Failing to Correct Problems

The billing feature is important to consider in the utility of the electronic health system because patients are not able to have approved care if the hospital is unable to communicate with the party that will be paying for the medical services. As a consequence, the electronic health record system is markedly less useful by failing to implement an operational billing system.  Therefore, it is important for EHR Untied to determine a solution to this problem and to incorporate it in all previously installed systems. The overall goal for this type of information system is to increase efficiency at the hospital and to decrease the amount of medical errors that occur, but none of these advantages are incurred if the billing system is not adequate. Therefore, it is reasonable for the company to consider the types of medical record systems that are used by a variety of organization in the Northeast to determine which types of system would need to be compatible with the new software. The new systems can therefore be changed in a manner that alters the format of outgoing files so that they can be received by older systems in a manner that still allows these documents to be read.

Other Thoughts

While EHR United is currently the top competitor of its field, it is necessary for it to remain competitive. Therefore, it is important for its employees to remain notified of the latest technology with regards to information systems software. In addition, these individuals must be aware of the systems that could be used to run this software. Therefore, the company could increase its efficacy by subscribing to professional journals and reading new news stories that will help the organization understand new techniques that it could use to improve its practices. Furthermore, a better data analysis plan may be needed for the company to pinpoint the changing needs of its clients before these needs are recognized by the hospital or independent care practice itself. As a result of these new principles, it is expected that EHR United will remain the leader of its field, as it provides excellent customer service to its clients by demonstrating their understanding of their needs, which is made possible by their data analytics skills.

Another way that the company could increase its ability to compete is with regards to its data storage suggestions. An example of this relates to the implementation of cutting edge technology to support already existing services. In particular, IBM has launched an initiative called “Project Big Storage”, that uses a combination of old data storage methods, such as disks, tapes, and flash drives, combined with cloud computing in order to store long-term data (Lawson). This is relevant to the health care setting because hospitals often deal with an overwhelming amount of records that they must keep for at least five years due to federal law. If these records are not being used, they can be sent to long-term data storage, which will allow their data retrieval systems to remain optimized, while these stored files will still be able to be quickly retrieved if a patient who has not visited the hospital in a long time decides to return. This is very common for patients who only go to the hospital for emergencies, which is a large percentage of hospital patrons. Therefore, the system could be optimized in a manner that allows for the type of information that the hospital needs to retrieve as well.

Electronic health record systems are a relatively new technology, so there is constantly room to improve these processes. As a result EHR United would benefit from a continued investigation into how this technology can be improved by incorporating new technological findings into this study. If EHR is able to accomplish this, they will be able to remain the leader of their field for many years to come.

Works Cited

Blumenthal D, Glaser JP. “Information Technology Comes to Medicine.” Web Site Disclaimers N Engl J Med. 2007. Web. 11 May 2015.

Lawson S. IBM cloud will reach back into tape for low-cost storage. 11 May 2015. Web. 11 May 2015.

Sittig DF, Singh H. Electronic Health Records and National Patient-Safety Goals. The New England Journal of Medicine 36(2012): 1854-1860.

Thurston J. Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records. The Journal for Nurse Practitioners 10.7(2014): 510-513.