Strategic
Planning In Healthcare
The
effectiveness of running a health center or hospital involves an implementation
of an information system. Selecting an information system is a process, one
that needs to be evaluated from two perspectives; internal and external. An
organization that has recently merged with other two hospitals offering the
same service is faced with the difficulty of designing and implementing a
system that will cut across the entire enterprise. Since the development and
implementation of a new system are not an option, a critical review of the
existing systems has to be done to determine which is best suited in running
the entire organization. Healthcare information systems (HIS) selection has
been one of the daunting tasks to healthcare providers, clinicians, and policy
makers (Hebda & Czar, 2013). The case
is not different for the committee charged with the duty of selecting an
information system that will inculcate the needs of the new organization. The
merging of the hospital with two other has increased its needs in terms of data
collection, processing, storage, and dissemination. A retrospective review of
similar cases that have been faced with the challenge of selecting an effective
system should be carried out as a preliminary requirement for analysis. There are five categories upon which the
selection process entails. A critical review of these sections enhances the adoption
of a system that is adaptive to the growing needs of the organization. The
basis of these requirements is data creation, data management, sharing of the
data, presentation of the data and management of the various modules.
Based
on the expansibility of the organization, a new practice management in the
electronic health keeping records have to be adopted. In addition to the issues
of data depicted above, the plan should evaluate the following areas to enhance
the success of implementing the system. Communication is key to the success of service
delivery in a health care institution. Communication has to be enhanced between
the medical practitioners such as doctors and nurses and the management team as
well as the technical people. From a technical perspective, it is relevant to
adopt a simple system; one that does not suffer from technical mishaps such as
constant breakdown during communication. In this case, the error logs of the
three systems to be considered have to be evaluated to enable determining that
is the most reliable in terms of communication. The system with the least
number of recorded errors should be considered as more reliable as compared to
the rest. In addition, the time spans between the occurrences of the errors
have to be considered. If the timestamps are close together, this means that
the system is prone to constant failures and breakdowns per average time as
compared to a system with errors apart.
Other
than communication, another point of consideration is the response time.
Hospital information systems should provide the least amount of response time
to enhance the delivery of service. Activities such as X-ray scans need
efficiency (Hebda & Czar, 2013).
Therefore, an information system that provides and distributes the scan results
within the least amount of time is worth adopting as opposed to a system that
takes more time to process and deliver the results. In addition to the response
time, accuracy should be paramount. In the medical fraternity, there is no
exception for errors since their occurrence can be catastrophic. As a result,
the results of the information systems in terms of calculations should be
compared to ensure that accurate results are delivered. The system that depicts
the least error margins for the greatest number of data results should be
considered for adoption as opposed to systems prone to errors.
Adopting
the right kind of information system enhances the performance of the
organization and in this regard, the evaluation process serves as a strategic
requirement. The right system improves the usability of health informatics
application. From an end users perspective, and in this case the end user is
the medical fraternity, the user interface design is paramount. Effective
design of the user interface does not only enhance the interaction with the
system, it enhances the delivery of service in a quick and effective manner.
Therefore, the process of selection should consider evaluating the three
systems in terms of design and their effectiveness in involving the end users.
Properly designed systems are easy to interact and work with and in the
process, motivates and enhances the working of the medics (Hebda & Czar, 2013). In addition to the
user interface, another evaluation point that should be incorporated is the
integration, implementation, and maintenance process. A system that provides an
ease in the application of the three undertakings is well suited for adoption
in the hospital. During merging, the hospital activities are affected, adopting
a system that minimizes or reduces this effect influences the delivery of
services and influences the normal running of the organization positively.
In
conclusion, the system to be adopted should be easy to adopt. It is better to
patch the current system to adapt to the changing needs of the organization than
introduce a new system that will cause ripples to the running of the hospital.
An effective system in this case should require the minimum training time for
the organization personnel to acquire and adopt (Hebda
& Czar, 2013). Personal records and health information exchanges,
policies and legal requirements should not be affected. If this happens, it
will incur more costs and time which is of the essence during the integration
and implementation phases.
References
Hebda,
T., & Czar, P. (2013). Handbook
of informatics for nurses & healthcare professionals. Boston: Pearson.
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