Are Electronic Medical Records a Cure for Health Care?

Case Summary Healthcare is a major topic in the media, and how it affecting people all over the country. The government has implemented laws and policies to ensure that individuals can receive the proper medical attention, and has made healthcare affordable for American that are not able to pay out of pocket for services provided. This action by the government has caused a surplus in patients seen by healthcare providers, which in return has increase the paperwork associated with business practices.

As a result, providers are implementing systems such as Electronic Medical Records to ensure that patient records are accurate and accessible for multiple providers for proper diagnosis. Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems are systems that provide “information about one’s life-long health condition and health care behavior which are on the basis of electric management. The records contained in the system have been constructed to take the place of paper medical records as the main information sources in medical care” (Chen, Wang, & Zhang, 2010).

As in any system, developers must understand how to integrate information to ensure that the system in capable function properly, and providing users with information requested by incorporating business intelligence into the implementation process. Business Intelligence (BI) enables developers to clearly state what is needed throughout the entire organization, and simplifies the implementation process during implementation deployment and administration. Implementing and integrating EMR systems is costly, but it is necessary for healthcare providers to adopt systems as this to ensure accuracy, errorless information. . ) What management, organization, and technology factors are responsible for the difficulties in building electronic medical records systems? Explain your answer As technology rapidly emerges, businesses are required to adopt new practices to maintain and streamline processes. Electronic medical records systems have surfaced to eliminate inefficiency, errors and cut enormous spending. Organizations must strategically implement and interact with agencies outside of its walls to integrate EMR systems into it infrastructure.

Healthcare management, insurance agencies, the government and technology advances have all played a major role in the delay of the creation of a global EMR system. The Government’s involvement in the implementation of EMR system is critical. In 2009, $19 billion was granted through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to encourage doctors and hospitals to install and use electronic health records (EHR’s) which is a fundamental component of EMR systems (MacKinnon & Wasserman, 2009). Without government funding, it would be merely impossible for organizations to implement and adopt ERM systems.

Expensive systems are usually frowned upon by organizations, for that reason the government must intervene to ensure improved speed and accuracy of data sharing, reporting, and planning. Healthcare providers are becoming overbooked and the paperwork is overwhelming. Adopting technology is necessary in the healthcare profession to handle daily workloads. The cost of implementing systems to fit the needs of the organization is the leading factor that causes providers to resist the integration and incorporation of EMR systems. IT developers are also high involved in the implementation of systems for hospitals and healthcare providers.

Investing in the EMR system is costly, but the failure to implement EMR systems is often contributed to developers ignoring stakeholders’ needs in the hospital (Su, Fulcher, Win, Chiu, & Chiu, 2008). 2. ) What stages of system building will be the most difficult when creating electronic medical record systems? Explain your answer With advances in technology, organization must continually upgrade current systems to ensure that the system’s capabilities are functional. One of the most difficult stages in the implementing of EMR system is the sharing of information between different systems.

One of the essential purposes of an EMR system is to collaborate and store patient information that can be accessed by multiple providers. Utilizing what is known as an electronic patient records system or (ERP) is an electronic structure for the maintenance of information about the health condition and the care received by someone all his/her life (Vilar & Boudoux, 2002) . Some institutions that implement systems using ERP could actually face problems due to HIPPA laws when making information available to other sources. Being able to provide information nationally could cause major problems for organizations utilizing as well.

Providers have issues with privacy with information be easily accessible. Protection of information is vital, and developer must be able to control access and information that is provided through EMR systems. Christa Teston in her article, Investigating usability and “meaningful use” of electronic medical records, “A wide-ranging survey of healthcare providers and patients resulted in negative attitudes from a rather substantial minority of participants about the secondary use of de-identified health information” (Teston, 2012). 3. Describe the application of business process management to the design of an electronic medical record system Within an EMR system, careful database management is needed to store relative and historical information. EMR systems implementations “require a significant investment in money and time, as well as process change and training, all of which carry a great deal of risk for the organization” (MacKinnon & Wasserman, 2009). The implementation of any system requires strategic planning and proactive approaches to management, and business processes.

There are design-related issues that many developers struggle with during the implementation process such as privacy, efficiency, accounting, and noise from data (Teston, 2012). EMR sharing system unified data structure enables the complete exchange of medical information within the hospital encompassed by a particular region. The organizational structure of hospitals can be directly mapped to share electronic medical record system, to simplify the management of permissions.

For that purpose, developer must strategically plan to implement a strong security measure for the system. Security implementation within the EMR system requires users such as providers, staff, and manager, to all obtain a registered certificate that enables access to the system (Chen, Wang, & Zhang, 2010). 4. ) Describe the importance of business intelligence and analytics capabilities in the design of an electronic medical record system Understanding technology and the needs of the users plays a vital role in implementing any system.

Proactively implementing systems that is readily able to adapt to future technology upgrades requires developers to have intensive knowledge of the industry practices and technology evolvement. Business Intelligence (BI) is used to describe applications and technologies that are collaborated to provide access to analyze data and information about an enterprise, in order assist with business decisions (Wu, Barash, & Bartolini, 2007). Data warehousing is one application that is used in the implementation of an EMR system, and is also considered traditional form of business intelligence.

The main goal of BI is to “provide a single vision for an entire organization; to simplify system implementation, deployment, and administration; and to deliver strategic, tactical, and operational knowledge and actionable insight” (Wu, Barash, & Bartolini, 2007). Reference Chen, Q. , Wang, Z. , & Zhang, W. (2010). Security Design for Electronic Medical Record. Intenational Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science, (pp. 1-4). doi:10. 1109/ICBECS. 2010. 5462307 MacKinnon, W. , & Wasserman, M. (2009). Implementing electronic medical record systems. 2nd Hawaii Intenational Conference on System Science (pp. 50-53). Waikoloa: IEEE Computer Society. doi:10. 1109/HICSS. 2009. 349 Su, Y. -Y. , Fulcher, J. , Win, K. T. , Chiu, H. -C. , & Chiu, G. -F. (2008). Evaluating the implementation of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Systems. IEEE 8th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology Workshops, (pp. 589-594). doi:10. 1109/CIT. 2008. Workshops. 45 Teston, C. (2012). Investigating Usability and “Meaningful Use” of Electronic. 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication, (pp. 27-232). New York. doi:10. 1145/2379057. 2379101 Vilar, G. , & Boudoux, C. (2002). The Medical Information Management System (SIGIM) – Elaboration of an Electronic Patient Record -. Proceedings of the Second Joint EMBSBMES Conference, (pp. 1954-1956). Houstin. doi:10. 1109/IEMBS. 2002. 1053112 Wu, L. , Barash, G. , & Bartolini, C. (2007). A Service-oriented Architecture for Business Intelligence. IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications, (pp. 279-285). doi:10. 1109/SOCA. 2007. 6