Gonzalez (2007), discusses the company WellPoint Inc. that provides its members with the capability to develop their own personal health records, an option to receive test results online, provide a limited set of records to their providers and to allow other family members access to the information. In terms of security safeguards, WellPoint tracks who accesses information and has staff members to monitor the systems for potential breaches. This in turn offers users a certain level of security and quality in services rendered.
As pay-for-performance programs flourish, there is a fear that many EHRs cannot accurately capture the data that is required to participate. The biggest obstacles for software makers are the sheer volume of performance measures and the lack of standardization among them. One pressing issue is that some EHR systems are still text-based and are therefore not as powerful for reporting and extracting information. (McKinney, 2007)
Wilson (2007), explains that since Michael Murphy became the top executive at San Diego-based Sharp Healthcare in June 1996, he has utilized a consensus-building style that continually led seven hospitals (four acute-care facilities and three specialized operations) and 2,600 affiliated physicians to leverage information systems to improve patient care. In addition to the physician-practice EMR, Murphy supported a difficult decision to deploy a single-product, inpatient EMR, severing decades-old relationships with a number of other vendors. Murphy says it is an important tool of a program he launched six years ago called "The Sharp Experience," which strives to improve patient, employee and physician satisfaction with the health system using Six Sigma, a systematic, data-driven approach to continuous quality improvement originally developed at Motorola.
Burda (2007), explains that many hospitals have been using the legal uncertainty over it subsidies to physicians as a reason not to provide practitioner with the funds to digitize their practices, clinics, and outpatient surgery and diagnostic centers. Under the federal tax code, the charitable assets of tax-exempt organizations such as not-for-profit hospitals cannot be used to benefit private individuals, including physicians. Hospitals that violate that code could face special excise taxes or even risk losing their tax-exempt status. This is a strong enough reason to not give funding so freely that would allow practitioners to acquire, install, and implement it in order to connect their practices to the hospitals where they admit and treat patients.
Leaders of both the hospital and physician communities as well as it advocates reported that such a connection is essential to improving patient care. Better coordination of data will in return bring about better coordination of care, safer patient care, and better clinical outcomes. However, until now, it was up to each side-hospitals and physicians-to buy their own it systems and hope they work together. Most often, it is the capital-deep hospital or hospital system with the state-of-the-art it system cajoling the capital-shallow physician or group practice to buy a similarly fancy it system. Study after study over the past few years has quantified the low penetration of various it systems in the physician sector.(Burda, 2007)
Burda (2007), concludes that there was a shift in the paradigm when it was reported that not-for-profits could give money to doctors to buy electronic health records systems without jeopardizing the hospitals' tax-exempt status. The IRS said such subsidies are permissible as long as the hospital-physician it arrangements do not violate any other federal laws. To avoid violating any other federal regulations like the anti-kickback statutes, which bar any form of remuneration to induce Medicare or Medicaid patient referrals, hospitals, must make the same it goods and services and the same level of subsidy available to all physicians on staff.
As healthcare stakeholders advance toward the President's vision of providing every American with an electronic medical record by the year 2014, a growing number are taking the intermediary step of creating personal health records (PHR). PHRs maintained by health plans are based on aggregated claims data. Plan-sponsored PHRs provide a broad range of information and enable patients to track their medical encounters across multiple providers. (Reese, 2007)
Use of it in health care is intensifying rapidly, with President George W. Bush calling for widespread adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) within the next ten years. In addition to digitizing the information that providers use to care for their patients within organizations, clinicians, patients, and policymakers are looking ahead to sharing appropriate information electronically among organizations. To explore the qualitative and economic implications of health care information exchange and interoperability (HIEI), the researchers studied the value of electronic data flow between providers (hospitals and medical...
They added newer constructs to a PSC model developed earlier by Gershon and his colleagues (2000), which unveiled the relationship of safety and security aspects and linked it with work performance. They found that when hospital staff used the Gershon tool there was considerable increase in the patient safety culture. They concluded that the health care decision makers when using Gershon safety tools, which appear to have sufficient reliability
Blueprint for Evaluating Patient Safety Competency in Nursing Students Ever since the report To Err is Human was published in 2000 by Kohn and colleagues, healthcare stakeholders in Western countries have intensified reform efforts designed to increase patient safety. The report revealed that nearly 100,000 patients were dying annually from medical errors in the 1990s, a statistic that caught the attention of legislators, healthcare policymakers, clinicians, patients, and the general
Many advocates of the move feel that lower patient to nurse ratio would lead to additional savings because it would reduce nurse turnover rate, lawsuits, complications and length of stay. Nursing unions in the state of California have asked for a PTN ratio of 3 to 1. The health association however agreed on 5 to 1 which sound more reasonable than the originally proposed 10 to 1. (Rothberg, 2005) Patient
Introduction Patient-centered care is the goal of many healthcare organizations, but the ability of an organization to deliver patient-centered care is influenced by a number of factors both internal and external. Business practices, regulatory requirements, and reimbursement all can impact patient-centered care in any healthcare organization. Promoting patient-centered care requires an organizational culture committed to this paradigm, which also needs to be embedded in the mission and values of the organization. Executives
Abstract In order to gather the challenges, it is necessary to rehabilitate organizations into learning institutions at the first step, so as to make them superlative. To make a change from a traditional to a learning organization, the main factor is leadership, which brings to light the goals and the main insights of the organization, assists workers to achieve their aims and helps them put up a learning condition which is
This is important, because it is showing how a lack of: following up and monitoring safety standards can increase the long-term financial problems facing a heath care facility. (Master, 2005, pp. 259 -- 285) At the same time, there is also the possibility that the lack of focus on safety could expose the hospital to possible law suits. This is because the plaintiffs could use this information to show, how
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