Managing and Leading Change in a Health Organization (Essay Sample)

Managing and Leading Change in a Health Organization
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Managing and Leading Change in a Health Organization
Part: Building Effective Teams
An Electronic Health Record (EHR) refers to a digital version of a patient's paper register. The system plays a significant role in storing patient medical history, medications, diagnosis, immunization dates, radiology images, treatment plans, and laboratory tests (American Medical Association. et al., 2012). As a clinic administrator given the responsibility to build effective teams that would work together in selecting a new EHR system for our clinic. I would follow the following plan to build effective teams. First, I would identify the groups that need to be involved in the process. To get the most compelling new EHR system, I would consider using medical assistants, nurses, schedulers, and physicians. These are the people that deal with the patients directly and are involved in keeping and planning their treatment. Thus, this means that they already have the necessary knowledge and skills of the system and understand the gaps needed to be filled.
Second, I would define the primary purpose of building the teams from the selected groups to make everyone aware of the direction we need to focus on. Additionally, I would work hard to create good relationships among the members to ensure unity to facilitate achieving the best (Barner & Barner, 2012). Creating a healthy relationship begins by making the participants know each other by emphasizing open and robust communication strategies. I understand that since the team will have different members, there is a higher possibility of experiencing indifferences. Since each person has a different viewpoint and experience on the EHR system, therefore, to work on this, we will consider using different consensus or team building methods to help us achieve the best. Some of the team-building methods that will be considered include brainstorming, which will involve active discussion of the members' ideas to assess the best in filling the EHR system gap. Second, I will consider incorporating the multi-voting team consensus building, which will enable us to choose the best ideas or priorities from a long list of all the suggested ideas from the team members (American Medical Association. et al., 2012). Additionally, I will consider pinpointing the priorities of all the ideas given by the team members. Through conducting active meetings, we will identify the most viable needs that require to be attended to. The process may not be easy, so it requires the members to have strong professional personalities. That may include employee encouragement, which involves supporting each member in every way to make them give their best. Furthermore, the team members need to show honesty and respect to their team members to allow easy building of trust.
Part 2: Evaluating the Concepts of Change Management Theories, Techniques, and Leadership
Implementation of the new EHR is not easy as it may seem to be for our organization. This is because it is exposed to facing serious implementation challenges such as higher costs, staff resistance, time-consuming due to training, and lack of usability. Our clinic is likely to face two main challenges from the new EHR system (Hodges, 2016). They include privacy issues and usability. Since the new EHR system has different operation methods than the old one, it requires the staff members to learn how to use it. Since daily operations must continue in the clinic, it denies them the chance to train on using it. Therefore, this creates flaws within different departments creating confusion and disorder, and at some point, loss of patient critical data. On the other hand, implementing the new EHR system may face privacy concerns among different groups in the clinic, such as patients and staff members (LaTour & Eichenwald, 2010). Medical staff is required to maintain confidentiality on the patient data all the time. Therefore, changing the EHR system may make them feel that the initial privacy is being compromised. This is because they may see it as a significant threat to cyber attacking, leading to patient data leakage. Thus, this would make them hesitate in making the changes. Similarly, patients may also take time to trust the new system entirely.
However, they are some ways that can be used to manage and overcome these challenges. First, on usability, the healthcare workers need to be subjected to a test drive on the system before its implementation (LaTour & Eichenwald, 2010). This would give them the chance to use and provide feedback on their strengths and faults. Thus, this would give the management team time and space to work on those faults. It is also essential to teach the staff the benefits of using the new system both to the patients and them. This is because it would make them feel more motivated and make its implementation successful and easy (Hodges, 2016). Regarding privacy concerns, the clinic can overcome them by creating strong PINs and passwords to hinder easy access to the stored patient data in the EHR system by third parties. Additionally, encrypting the stored patient data is vital as it would help convert the readable information into an encoded format to secure it from being accessed by other people.
Part 3: Implementation of a Departmental Strategic Plan
The implementation of the new EHR system in the clinic requires a specific plan to enhance its success. Since there will be a transfer of data from the old system to the new one, the health care department must ensure the software is well prepared, and the hardware needs are met (American Medical Association. et al., 2012). During the implementation process, the clinic change department must understand that they are various risk exposure mitigation risk areas that they need to work on. Two of the areas of risk exposure mitigation related to the EHR system implementation include data privacy compliance. As discussed earlier, data privacy concern is a tremendous challenge in implementing the new EHR system.
Therefore, this requires the health care organization to protect all the patient information in all areas. This is to avoid breaching, resulting in higher fines (American Medical Association. et al., 2012). On the other hand, insufficient preparation of healthcare workers is also an area of risk exposure mitigation. Implementing the new EHR system means new methods and procedures will be used to store the patient data. Therefore, they require to learn new skills using the sy