Healthcare Research (Term Paper Sample)

Feasibility study for implementation of an electronic health records management system
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Introduction
The ability to create an information shedding platform, both internally and externally in a healthcare facility has been accepted as a fundamentally important method of improving the quality of healthcare delivery. Maintenance of cohesive data integrity is critical to meeting these fundamental goals. Numerous errors in the filing of patient records pose great risks that can greatly compromise quality of care. Allocated storage and dissemination of information is essential for quality decision-making and maintenance of this to standards of healthcare. The quality of information contained in an electronic health record is largely dependent on proper storage of accurate information from the point of capture and maintenance standards of integrity for that particular information. Clinical documentation plays a crucial role in maintenance of data quality and integrity. Therefore, proper clinical documentation standards and practices needed to be developed and maintained in a standardized version in order to facilitate accurate information entry and encoding. Many health centers across the world are enabling community healthcare providers to adopt and maintain appropriate health technology within their practices. However, investment in electronic medical records is a huge undertaking and many hospital managers find it hard to ascertain precisely how the heavy investment will support their organization’s goals. Given the huge capital investments required, it is critical to approach the implementation of EHRs as a strategic alignment decision. Although EMR systems offer various benefits to healthcare providers, they come with both advantages and disadvantages in regards to their cost-effectiveness. This paper is aimed at analyzing the economic effects of implementing an EMR system within our hospital set-up on the basis of the different costs associated with managerial accounting.
The most common problem is that implementation of EMRs is usually perceived as a two-way exchange: the health facility provides the healthcare providers with a new practice tool. On the other hand, the healthcare providers must guarantee the hospital their loyalty. It is important to acknowledge the fact that an electronic health records system is not just a means of speeding up and simplifying the normal processes within the prevailing organizational boundaries. Essentially, it bears the potential to introduce new relationships that span across the payer, traditional provider, and patient borderlines. This proves that the system provides a powerful opportunity for aligning healthcare, as well as physician’s motivation towards the achievement of strategic goals (Barlow et al 2004).
MECHANISM OF IMPLEMENTATION
The implementation of a feasible EMRs system into physician practices calls for careful operational, technical and financial planning. Once the system has been enacted, the next objective is to make sure that the operability of the system brings value by establishing connections with a diverse range of stakeholders. The basic concept of implementing an EMR system is based upon the following four milestones:
Interoperability-this involves getting the healthcare providers linking with the health information systems of other healthcare organizations, including an approximate 20 percent of adjacent physician practicalities that have already integrated an EMR system within their organization.
Network expansion – this involves the development of links between the hospital’s EMR system and other crucial hospital information systems (such as a radiology PACS) and creating a connection with users from other healthcare facilities such as independent clinics, labs, and pharmacies.
Enhance functionalities- this involves the creation of advanced functionalities such as electronic referrals, e- prescribing and electronic order entry, that allow healthcare providers to take advantage of the existing network connections.
Patient integration – this involves the practice of incorporating patients into the network by way of various application portals and functions such as automated secure test results, prescription refill, appointment scheduling, renewal requests, and registration.
The widespread integration of EMR systems has been hailed by healthcare practitioners as a milestone strategy for systematically eliminating medical errors and in turn improves clinical quality. While most scholars consider EMR system adoption as an inevitable undertaking for any quality healthcare provider, this viewpoint has not deterred our organization from conducting a business analysis study to determine the viability of the new system in terms of quality care and cost effectiveness. The results of the study have informed our organization’s understanding on resource allocation needs and clarified expectations regarding financial and clinical performance metrics that need to be monitored via the EMR system (Wang et al 2003). Therefore, our conclusive study has formed the basis for the ongoing organizational preparations and support to ensure successful system implementation. There is optimism that the newly implemented system will improve provider performance, especially with the hospital information management and decision support tools that will accompany the successful implementation of the new system. This will be particularly so since the EMR system is expected to provide high data fidelity, ensure ready availability of information and assist in translating medical data into context-specific information which will empower physicians in their daily duties. In spite of the heterogeneity observed in our analytic methods, all cost-benefit analyses have provided credible evidence that the new system will introduce monumental cost savings once the implementation and adoption is completed. These quantifiable benefits are expected to outweigh the initial investment expenses.
MANAGEMENT GOALS
While creating a health information network within the EMR system, healthcare managers must pursue integration with other physicians in order to achieve clinical, strategic and management goals. The first part involves constructive collaboration geared at improving patient health outcomes across all health care settings within the hospital. Generally, the EMR system goes a long way in supporting physician performance with much functionality such as medical management templates, medical alerts, and many more (Shea & Hripcsak G 2010). The system also enables the management to keep a track on physician’s adherence to standard practices, and measure hospital healthcare outcomes. The most critical management goals that the implementation of the EMR system will enable the hospital to meet include the following:
Financial Integration with Physicians
A successful clinical integration of the EMR system will require physicians to become more closely connected to the hospital since it is via the hospital centered network that they be able to access better incentive payment opportunities and contractual rates on the basis of their clinical quality outcomes. In this regard, successful implementation of an EMR system will lead to clinical integration that will then precipitate powerful financial integration between the hospital and physicians.
Strong Goal alignment.
The implementation of the system is expected to enhance the physicians ‘commitment to the vision of healthcare being created by the new network. This is expected to make the physicians more involved in working towards the realization of hospital’s objectives, best practices, processes, and strategies. Consequently, the employees will finally perceive their professional goals as interwoven with those of the organization (Hillestad et al 2005).
Increasing Leverage.
As healthcare outcomes improve on the EMR system proves its ability to realize the organizations best practices quickly, the hospital is expected to develop significant leverage with payers. This will also apply to negotiations with private payers as well as the ability to benefit from other government-sponsored health quality care initiatives. In fact, there is a great opportunity to establish direct negotiations between the hospital and other large-scale self-insured employers. Furthermore, the hospital can negotiate the preferred EMR system pricing on behalf of other participating community physicians especially when a critical mass will be already in place (Jha et al 2009).
Even though the integration of an EMR system is expected to report an overall growth in administrative costs, it will be cost-effective in the long run since the cumulative NPV is expected to be positive as has been the case with studies conducted on previous adoptions of the system. The expected positive NPV is expected to be a result of both additional revenues as well as cost reductions from administrative operations. It is important to note that during the analysis of the cost effectiveness of EMR adoption, any qualitative factors such as improvements to patient safety are excluded. This is because such factors are essential issues in provision of healthcare services, but they are not easily converted into financial values (Shekelle et al 2006). The feasibility study mainly dwells on the tangible items that can be analyzed in managerial accounting. The benefits expected from the acquisition of the EMR system include additional revenues and reduction of current expenditure. The reduction of costs will emanate from the savings made after the elimination of the traditional paper-chart system that has a huge number of employees. Generally, cost reductions is expected to be achieved through several ways such as
Elimination of supplies for...