What are the physicians trying to accomplish through buying the same EHR product at their hospital? What are the pros and cons?
Why are the physicians not able to send a medication order to the hospital from their e-prescribing device?
Physicians are unable to send medication orders to the hospital from their electronic prescribing devices because the devices don’t work with the clinical pharmacy. They are able to send prescriptions to major pharmacies excluding smaller ones. This is an example of the reason for not rushing to buy systems before making sure they are compatible. It leads to double spending and wastage of resources and time. The can still use the electronic prescribing devices in future, but will have to ensure that they implement a clinical pharmacy system that is similar to the healthcare facility.
What is the difference between scanning, COLD feeding, and point-of-care (POC) data entry?
Point of care data entry allows healthcare facilities to enter their data in real time. This is beneficial because it allows hospitals to input records right away and avoid repetition errors. Data entry is also fast and data becomes readily available. Scanning is a time consuming data entry method and can take up to a whole year or longer to complete. It wastes valuable physician time and involves tons of documents that had been previously written out into the hospital database. The tedious nature of this process has given rise to hybrid systems that preserves old documents and moves them over to new systems. COLD feeding involves archiving reports and allowing them to automatically update databases during certain times of the day. The advantage with COLD feeding is the records are readily available without consumption of much space. These different parts of the system development lifecycle are implemented differently because the HER cannot be migrated overnight (Sayles, 2013).
How could the hospital improve upon its data quality?
The hospital can improve on the quality of its data using various means. Data entry can be first made easier using macros, copy-paste functions, techniques of reusing data, and other standard functions. Comment fields in the data entry fields can also help in determining the exact kind of data that should be entered. Use of drop down menus for choice options, for example, gender: male or female, eliminates typo errors and too much typing effort. It’s also important to make major fields, including name, age, sex, date-of-birth, transferrable to eliminate data discrepancies.
Consider the real world case study and what the physicians are trying to accomplish by purchasing these products. When you think about the system development life cycle, use what you learned in unit 1 to determine how this could help in accomplishing the goals associated with this case study.
The planning phase of the system development lifecycle can help out with this case study because it allows physicians to determine the kind of HER systems needed. The design phase of the SDLC will enable them to assemble all the systems they may need so that they can run everything more efficiently. If the physicians and the hospital management can meet and discuss the requirements for the HER systems, then the SDLC process will be much easier. Implementing this system will take more time than other stages and will enhance the development of a better system. The HER system after being implemented will work to improve the hospital processes and make easier the work of the physicians.
Reference
Sayles, N. (2013). Health information management technology: An applied approach (Fourth ed., pp. 1011-1014).
