Question

NURS 3110: Information Management and Patient Care Technology Week 4 Introduction Resources Discussion Week in Review TOSTW TO Owing. • Explain how nurses impact the implementation and adoption of Health IT systems in your organization or one with which you are familiar. If your organization or one with which you are familiar has not adopted Health IT systems, use another major change initiative that impacts nursing practice as an example. • Examine a workaround or a workflow issue that has impacted you in your work setting. Discuss the impact of the workaround or workflow issue. Was a policy formulated in response or were the issues analyzed and solutions implemented to change the process? Provide details about the change that occurred or the policy implementation process and nursing involvement in the solution.

Answer 1

1. Health information technology or HIT is a group of technologies which include System software’s which are developed for the improvement of quality of healthcare and for better health outcome. Nurses play a crucial role in HIT as they handle most of the equipment’s and moreover it is really important that a nurse should adapt with the HIT as it directly impacts on its success.

I will be taking EHR(Electronic health record )as an example which was implemented in our hospital long back and has really improved in making the work easy, even though initial phase while implementation of EHR was quite a huddle, Later it has really made the clinical work more effortless and accurate. Below are some advantages which I felt has really impacted on the work flow for both doctors and nurses as well as other health care workers

a. Medical errors have been considerably reduced as most of the errors were caused due to illegible handwriting.For example while odering drugs for the patient it was always a problem in understanding doctors handwriting o which drug was prescribed.

b. Lab values are updated in the patient’s blood result section and abnormal values are marked in red for the easy identification. This also reduced unnecessary job for the nurses to collect the lab reports during the doctor’s rounds as all reports is updated in the record.

c. The Data is really safe as only health care workers have access to the portal with the user id and password so that everyone cannot access the Personal health information (PHI). Moreover all reports and records are secure and will not be missed due to mishandling where as if a file were used instead of EHR there will be a higher chance of missing pages or reports which was a common issue and sometimes leading to medico legal issues also.

d. EHR is very helpful for the patients who applies for the medial insurance as all details are clear and arranged in a proper way so that the insurance approval was easy.

2. The main work flow issue which I faced was the intend taking(Each shift nurses are supposed to take the count of drugs and articles in the ward which consumes more than 45 minutes of the precious time just to record. Sometimes the name of the articles has to written in a new page if the sheet ends or if purchased a new record which again was causing wastage of time and effort.

3. As time is very precious for nurses and for me delay in completing the intend book was directly impacting on the time taken for patient handover. As the previous shift staff will be waiting for the handover and only once we complete the intend book we were supposed to take the handover. This was discussed with the nursing head and she had a talk with the IT department and they formulated a separate tool for the wards intend. All articles count will be initially added by the ward head nurse in a sheet(tool). The articles or drugs used by a specific staff in the shift for the paient have to mention that in the system with the patients IP number. System calculates the remaining count and it also shows the specific item which was used and for which patient also. This made the work more systematic and accurate. Night duty staff used to replace the items as per the sheet and ward head was monitoring the sheet daily.