Team Consensus

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) states that in order to realize meaningful use of the EHR technology, healthcare providers are obliged to apply the technology in a approach that enriches quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare delivery; ebbs healthcare inconsistencies; involves patients and families; enriches care coordination; expands population and public health; and guarantees sufficient privacy and security guards for personal health information. (U.S Department of Health and

The SWOT analysis will focus on the organizations and their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Organizations will have to face challenges, but how they recover and cope with them is important. The SWOT implies that the implementation of EHR faces some challenges of improving the safety, cost, Lack of System Integration, and productivity of patient care. Legal compliance/regulations are still a problem facing the healthcare industry as they assure security of information. The investment in the EHR is a key area when addressing these concerns because of the access of healthcare supply chains increase in workflow and efficiency. Hence, the implementation of EHR requires a level of data within the system by a

Although the EHR is still in a transitional state, this major shift that electronic medical records are taking is bringing many concerns to the table. Two concerns at the top of the list are privacy and standardization issues. In 1996, U.S. Congress enacted a non-for-profit organization called Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This law establishes national standards for privacy and security of health information. HIPAA deals with information standards, data integrity, confidentiality, accessing and handling your medical information. They also were designed to guarantee transferred information be protected from one facility to the next (Meridan, 2007). But even with the HIPAA privacy rules, they too have their shortcomings. HIPAA can’t fully safeguard the limitations of who’s accessible to your information. A short stay at your local

EHR was created to have a technical way to securely exchange private and personal medical health information in hopes to improve the quality of care, decrease medical errors, limiting paper use, reduction of health care cost, and increasing a person access to affordable health care. A mandate was created for EHR stating that health records can be accessible to all facilities with patients having the capability to access their own health records at any time. Ameliorating the quality and convenience of care given to a patient, allow for cost saving measures, engage the patient and family to participate in their care, improve accuracy of medical diagnosis, and enhance the efficiency of the overall outcome of the patients’ health.

Several years ago, a mandate was ordered requiring all healthcare facilities to progress from paper charting and record keeping to electronic health record (EHR). This transition to electronic formatting has pros and cons associated with it. I will be describing the EHR mandate, including who initiated it, when it was initiated, the goals of the EHR, and how the Affordable Care Act and the Obama administration are tied into it. Then I will show evidence of research and discuss the six steps of this process as well as my facilities progress with EHR. Then I will describe meaningful use and how my facility attained it. Finally, I will define HIPAA law, the possible threats to patient confidentiality relating to EHR, and how what my facility

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act made an investment in the year 2009 to encourage the adoption and implementation of the electronic health records (EHRs)(Cite). EHRs incentive payments were authorized through Medicare and Medicaid to clinicians and hospitals when they privately and securely used EHRs for achieving improvements in care delivery by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). The healthcare organizations are expected to demonstrate meaningful use of EHRs. This rule of meaningful use has been implemented to strike a balance between acknowledging the urgency of adopting EHRs for improving the healthcare system and identifying the challenges that would be put forth

Hence, EHR 's are inherently complex amalgamations of diverse subsystems targeted toward varied users. The stakeholders are the users and must have a role in implementing any IT or EHR system into its work flow. An EHR can be customized to accommodate any environment depending on the level of expertise of the vendor and how long they have been in the business of creating an optimum system that 's customized to fit the organizations needs. For the most part, EHR 's must be designed for efficient, error free use. Ideally, an EHR is a system that encompass all the subsystems that make a hospital meet "meaningful use" criteria to acquire incentives for adopting EHR into practice. In the next five years, EHR adoption will no longer be a luxury, it will be a "MUST". EHR 's and other health information technology will be a necessity to practice medicine (econsultant.com, 2010). Rather than purchase several standalone systems, it would behoove one , in my opinion , to purchase an EHR that would satisfy all the needs of the stakeholders, the physician , nurses and other hospital staff and all parties involved in the tertiary practice too. Although LWMS 's budget is not large enough to accommodate the full cost of implementing an EHR,

Anita Ground also stresses on the huge importance of this planning stage by using a concept of system life cycle. It consists of feasibility study, analysis, design, programming, implementation, and lastly maintenance (Ground, 2011, VA TMS training material). The analysis phase in particular would coincide with what the author Yoshihashi is presenting in figuring out office strategy and researching EHR options. Identification of stakeholders and system requirement would play a critical role in EHR adoption (Ground, 2011). Stakeholders would include patients, family, clinicians, billing, registration, and coding as well as the external users such as Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Bottom line is that the new system being purchased would need to provide meaningful use to the clinic based on the current certification standards.

In the recent years, EHR implementation has been one of the biggest change that occurred in the health care delivery system. The adoption of EHR system which aims to improve the quality of healthcare, however, has met a lot of issues and barriers that are detrimental to its success. Thus, for any healthcare organization to achieve a favorable outcome after the EHR implementation, numerous factors have to be examined. Merrill (2010) has listed down the top ten factors for a successful EHR adoption. It includes right leadership, shared vision, right culture, governance, physicians, nurses and key stakeholders are engaged early and accountable to lead the clinical transformation, resources, clinical content standardization, realistic timelines and expectations, effective training and communication plan, and right vendor partnership relationship.

Resistance towards EHR systems tends to run high among physicians. The increase in the adoption of EHR in health systems has its challenges and concerns. Many physicians complain of negative impact on workflow, productivity disruption, and most importantly the physician-patient relationship. Earnest et al. (2004) concluded that physicians’ had initially thought information technology would be an obstacle to their workflow. Also, federal mandates with deadlines have created an environment where many physician practices have adopted an EHR strictly for compliance without any thought to the ongoing needs of the system (Porter, 2015). The EHRs that were quickly brought to market have been the source of ongoing frustrations and issues since they had the sole purpose of meeting

Getting successful universal EHR is not just technology selection, implementation question it needs to address many other aspects such as physician’s acceptance, policy/laws, incentives, security, and privacy and training issues before we can concentrate or focus on technology selection and implementations. The ecosystem should be ready with all these critical elements addressed only then successful EHR implementation can sustain in US. First and foremost there is a need to have consistency around the state/federal and HIPPA regulations which defines security and privacy issues in US. Due to conflicting requirements in these regulations mass acceptance of any medical system/technology cannot be effectively done. Second biggest issue for universal EHR adoption is the acceptance of EHR by physician’s communities. The benefits of EHR has been identified and acknowledged by medical communities at large however the rate of adoption and use after implementation is sluggish. The biggest common contributor for implementation, design and use of EHR systems is physician. Physicians should be properly trained and emphasis on continual education should also be placed through continuing education credits. Unless small physician office (stand-alone offices) buy-in the adoption of EHR no matter what technology and processes we have in place, EHR won’t be universally accepted and the entire benefit and value associated with EHR can be realized with universal acceptance of EHR. Thus need for

The current push for widespread implementation of a certified EHR is somewhat of a mess. Many healthcare providers did not want to change from their current methods. Without making the change, they risked the possibility of consistent (yearly) financial penalties for not adhering to standards. Certified EHRs have the ability to revolutionize healthcare. As every knows EHRs are a great tool for improving the quality of care. The information that EHRs contain can be collected to conduct meaningful research in order to improve clinical, organizational, and societal outcomes. In regards to legal situations EHRs will hold all evidence relating to complaints of medication error, malpractice, etc.

Electronic health records (EHR’s) have many advantages, but there are plenty of disadvantages. EHR’s were created to manage the many aspects of healthcare information. Medical professionals use them daily and most would feel lost without it. Healthcare organizations were encouraged to adopt EHR’s in 2009 due to the fact that a bill passed known as The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act). “The HITECH Act outlines criteria to achieve “meaningful use” of certified electronic records. These criteria must be met in order for providers to receive financial incentives to promote adoption of EHRs as an integral part of their daily practice”, (Conrad, Hanson, Hasenau & Stocker-Schneider, 2012).

During the initiation phase of an EHR, it’s imperative to keep security at the forefront of discussions. There is actually quite a bit of resources that need dedicated to the needs of security at this point. The facility information security officer and key stakeholders should be engaged early on in the discussion of an EHR system. This will ensure appropriate focus on not only institutional security policies related to healthcare data, but also at state and federal regulations aimed at safeguarding healthcare data and the systems that contain it. In addition, at this phase it’s imperative to discuss the what the business impact to the organization would be should the system be compromised and/or suffer catastrophic failure, so that recovery plans and options can begin to be visualized. This is the common goal of a business impact analysis and disaster recovery review. Another key point of focus during the initiation phase would be to look towards the development of the system with regards to infrastructure needs to maintain privacy and

When implementing a new EHR, departments need to have a plan in place when the system causes change to the process and design within the organization. Often times, regulations and policies need to be changed to coincide with a new system in place, such as a new EHR program (University of Scranton, 2017). A way to mitigate this situation is to start at the federal level’s regulations and work down the scope from there. This will guarantee that mandatory rules are still being followed and there is successful transition into future policies. Additionally, funding will be crucial to the organization’s ability to have a new EHR system. Each department needs to ensure they are properly tracking funds and that they can afford to upgrade.