The strategic information plan that needs to be implemented within my organization is having one standard Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for the whole health care organization (HCO). I currently work for an HCO that has some hospitals using Cerner some using Epic. Outpatient practices use AthenaHealth, and home health uses an entirely different EMR. This can lead to potential errors in patient care by not having the EMR in one cohesive place for all to access within their relevant scope of practice.
Smith, T. & McBride, S. (2018). Data, reporting, and analytics. In. S. McBride & M. Tietze (Eds.), Nursing informatics for the advanced practice nurse (2nd ed., pp 400-423). Springer Publishing Company.
The best way to ensure an organization can serve its patient population is to invest in the use of a strategic plan. An encompassing strategic plan should include specific information about budget planning, goals for the organization that are measurable, data management, and patient-centered care. This should utilize the Enterprise Data Management, Reporting, and Analytics Program (E-DRAP) framework and have input from a variety of disciplines within the organization (McBride & Tietze 2018). Building a secure, easy-to-use, system that is capable of reporting data is essential to creating a foundation for integrating business and clinical tools with patient care.
Currently, my organization is a federally qualified health center, that serves as a patient-centered medical home throughout many low-income areas of Chicago. We are fortunate enough to use EPIC which has a large portfolio of analytic capabilities and is a great clinical tool. EPIC can run reports, track outcomes, encourage meaningful use, and pull data in from our partners (with consent) to ensure we are able to deliver the best care possible. Companies that utilize analytic programs capable of sorting large data can improve the quality of care (Kamble et al., 2018). This coincides with our strategic plan of meeting patients where they are and trying to reach as many of our members as possible. We currently have a limited view of EPIC since we are outpatient and do not have access to the entire analytic capabilities EPIC offers.
To evaluate our readiness to advance to a more comprehensive system we need to look at the technology, people, analytic content, and processes involved (McBride & Tietze 2018). We currently use a closed system that allows partner data to be pulled in as long as that partner is with our EMR system. EPIC offers educators, IT solutions managers, and other team members who can be placed on our account to help meet our technology needs. Being able to pull data in from multiple sources, including those outside the EPIC family, to create ‘a single source of truth’ is crucial for our vulnerable population (McBride & Tietze 2018).
The people involved are stakeholders, end-users, patients, and the clinical team. The program needs to be able to segregate the clinical team from the operations team and protect patient information. We need to ensure customization for the addition of the reports with the providers being able to run and manage their own dashboards for quality (McBride & Tietze 2018). We need committees that include the clinical team and quality team to ensure the correct patient panel is accounted for. We should pilot these programs and new dashboards for feasibility, useability, and complete ‘stress tests’ to ensure the program makes sense for the entire organization (McBride & Tietze 2018). Once piloted successfully we should offer additional education to the clinicians or sites that have identified technological deficits.
Our organization is focused on quality metrics and moving away from a fee-for-service model. This has been a difficult transition, but EPIC has helped track what has been done within our organization regarding quality. Care gaps are one way to improve quality, these measures are things like cervical cancer screenings, mammograms, colorectal cancer screenings, etc. Allowing outside vendors to close care caps could be invaluable in our goal to decrease health inequities in Chicago. This can help reduce duplicate work, labs, orders, referrals and decrease the amount of time spent on prior authorizations, claims, and harmonize data (Attaran, 2020). Using analytic reports and content we can identify the areas with lower quality and focus our efforts on closing care gaps for those patients. I believe we are in the pre-action phase and can move on to this upgrade for our strategic plan for 2023.
Attaran, M. (2020). Blockchain technology in healthcare: Challenges and opportunities. International Journal of Healthcare Management, 1-14.
Kamble, S. S., Gunasekaran, A., Goswami, M., & Manda, J. (2018). A systematic perspective on the applications of big data analytics in healthcare management. International Journal of Healthcare Management.
McBride, S., & Tietze, M. (2018). Nursing informatics for the advanced practice nurse (2nd ed.). New York: Springer Publishing Company. ISBN: 9780826140456
Utilizing the E-DRAP framework from your assigned readings, Chapter 17 of your textbook, you are to:
- Evaluate your own organization’s readiness to move forward on a strategic information plan to best utilize enterprise data.
- Assess the key components of reporting and analytics content, specifically addressing the people, technology, and processes.
Enterprise Data Management, Reporting, Analytic Program (E-DRAP) is designed to connect clinical, financial, operational, and third-party data sources for reporting, analytics, and research purposes within an organization (McBride and Tietze, 2019). Using E-DRAP, I evaluated the readiness of the University of Utah Hospital to move forward on a strategic information plan to best utilize enterprise data.
E-DRAP is broken down into three main components which are people, technology, and processes. The people component is comprised of the CEO, Information Governance, Program Management, stakeholders, senior leaders, physicians, nurses, clinical operations, and finance (McBride and Tietze, 2019). For an organization to be ready to move forward on a strategic information plan, the people involved within the organization must have clear communication among all team members, use data and analytics to move towards reaching the goals and have transparency among all members (McBride and Tietze, 2019). The technology component includes the organization’s Data Architecture Foundation and Business Intelligence Library (McBride and Tietze, 2019. The goal of the Data Architecture Foundation is to provide trusted, reliable, and accessible data to meet the goals, while the Business Intelligence Library is an online collection of content that is shared with users that are convenient within their analytics workflow (McBride and Tietze, 2019). An organization must have these elements in place for it to move towards a strategic information plan. The processes component includes three pieces. The first piece is a road map that prioritizes program management (McBride and Tietze, 2019). The second piece includes key continuous and iterative process cycles that assess readiness, design, reporting, and analytics (McBride and Tietze, 2019). The last piece includes supporting best practice methods to be used (McBride and Tietze, 2019). Once all aspects of E-DRAP have been met, then the organization can move forward with its strategic information plan.
The University of Utah Hospital already has a strategic plan in place for the next several years and have it laid out on their hospital website. The overall strategic plan is to serve the community, lead education, discovery, and innovate care leading to positive outcomes (Good, 2020). The plan includes effective communication, inclusion, diversity, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the use of research and data among all team members (Good). The hospital is also using digital health systems and resources to coordinate care, develop successful health plans, have positive outcomes, align clinical practices (Good, 2020). The hospital uses the culture of data and analytics as a core asset to bring transparency and accountability into the organization (Good, 2020). Overall I feel that the University of Utah hospital is ready to move forward with its strategic plan, due to the effective utilization of the E-DRAP components.
References
Good, M. (2020, November 11). Our strategic roadmap to 2025. University of Utah Health Sciences – Research, Education, Clinical Care – Salt Lake City, Utah. https://uofuhealth.utah.edu/notes/postings/2020/11/strategic-roadmap.php#.YjtkZ5rMK3I (Links to an external site.)
McMcbride, S., & Tietze, M. (2019). Nursing Informatics for the Advanced Practice Nurse. (2nd ed.). New York: Springer Publishing Company. ISBN: 9780826140456
Security threats can be alarming for any organization. For healthcare entities, this is especially true due to the nature of the information collected and stored. The advent of EMR/EHR systems is a double-edged sword. Data can be stored and accessed by medical professionals easier, and give patients more autonomy over their health data, but can also be vulnerable to hackers and data breaches (McBride & Tietze, 2018). These threats can often be mitigated by proper security training, procedures, and protocols. Significant security measures need to be in place to protect health information as well as to help prevent erroneous orders and fraud (Vinaykumar et al., 2019). The EMR system is not the only vulnerable technology within healthcare entities.
According to McBride and Tietze (2018) additional technologies can be targeted through things like trojans, malware, viruses, etc. These threats are typically sent via email from outside untrusted sources that might look like they come from within the company. Once access has been gained unauthorized users can take over the computer, gain access to protected information, and even steal passwords. Our company has an automatic scan of any email with an attachment that delays the recipient from opening a potentially harmful attachment. At times, this can be cumbersome, but a slight delay is better than a system-wide breach.
Factors that contribute to security threats are vast and evolving rapidly. Some are easy to troubleshoot and safeguard against, limiting access to computers with EMR accessibility, password protection, and two-factor authentication are some of the easier implements against security threats (Chen et al., 2020). These can be done at the organization level with input from shareholders, IT, and end-users. Other threats are harder to protect against and not as easy to find. Making sure only clinical personnel can access HIIT is an important and often late consideration (McBride & Tietze, 2018). This can separate the protected data from those who shouldn’t have it. This has been a growing concern in hospitals near and around LA due to the celebrities that might be brought in. We had to all sign additional NDA forms and be restricted to patients on our floors only during my clinical rotations in nursing school to combat the release of protected health information.
Our practice utilizes block-chain EMRs for ease of use. This is a universal practice for our EMR system and helps to pull data in from participating partners. Our organization helps to safeguard against some threats by adding layers to the data that can be accessed (Vinaykumar et al., 2019). One of these layers is consent, each patient needs to authorize us to view their outside health information, another is a read-only feature for outside reconciled information and a third is the safe storage of any consolidated health information.
Chen, C. L., Huang, P. T., Deng, Y. Y., Chen, H. C., & Wang, Y. C. (2020). A secure electronic medical record authorization system for smart device application in cloud computing environments. Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, 10(1), 1-31.
McBride, S., & Tietze, M. (2018). Nursing informatics for the advanced practice nurse (2nd ed.). New York: Springer Publishing Company. ISBN: 9780826140456
Vinaykumar, S., Zhang, C., & Shahriar, H. (2019). Security and privacy of electronic medical records. SAIS 2019 Proceedings, 29, 1-6.