NURS FPX 6214 Assessment 1
Technology Needs Assessment
Healthcare inequalities have been on the rise as these patients are not adequately supervised, managed, prevented, or treated by healthcare professionals. Currently, the healthcare services offered to patients of Vila Health are circumcision of healthcare services without restraint and accountability.
As a result, the patients face many near-miss evaluations and adverse event events like lower medication errors, patient falls, catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI), central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI), and readmission rates within 30 days of the hospital stays. In efforts to eliminate inadequate access to care, Vila Health has resolved to integrate telehealth in its health system using an EHR to address issues highlighted earlier in the healthcare system.
Relevance and Importance of Needs Assessment
The needs assessment will seek to change the existing policies in the health care system, offering a new service delivery environment. It will also enhance patients’ overall healthcare and mitigate mostly preventable care complications, DHRs, and MEs, among other medical calamities. EHR systems will improve patient outcomes (Healthit. gov, 2019).
Ensures Positive Outcomes
Evidence shows that introducing the EHR system has promoted positive results and reduced healthcare inequalities. Initially, the idea behind the EHR system was to maintain the patient’s current status information. It holds all the details about medications the patient has taken so far, diseases, current prescribed medications, and any allergies they have.
Since the system is interlinked, it will also enable any healthcare provider to have an internet connection to access the patient’s information. As a result, there is a low likelihood of exposure to near-misses or adverse outcomes resulting from medical mistakes in care delivery in healthcare organizations. This assists in alerting healthcare providers to the risks prone to harming the patient and makes them change their healthcare plans to prevent harm to the patient and enhance healthcare quality and safety.
According to Health. Gov (2019) states that accidents such as the wrong dosage of medication or the interaction of drugs are avoided by the EHR system because of the warning or alert system built into the system. Therefore, patients are saved from medication errors. On a similar note, it also points out that the problem of medication errors emanating from poor, poor, illegible handwriting on the prescription part of the health care providers has been eliminated by implementing computerized digital prescriptions through the EHR system.
Hence, the said EHR system demonstrates its positive effects in terms of minimizing medication errors by around 62%, enhancing the patient satisfaction rate when the readmission rate is lowered, and the cost of therapy that has been reduced from the patient’s side. Working with staff completed near-miss events, which offer an understanding of what might have occurred within a healthcare setting, by 59%, patient falls reduced by 19%, and patients with a specific ethnicity saw an improvement of 9% in their representation at the hospital. Consequently, the use of EHR eliminated or at least contributed significantly to reducing healthcare disparities.
Tapuria et al. (2021) have pointed out that patient care has been made safe and suitable for the patient’s good without harming the patient through the EHR system. Since it is an integrated healthcare system, the facilities that give access to patients’ healthcare records plans are similar to all convenience healthcare facilities.
Assumptions
The assumptions behind the suggested needs assessment include expected changes in HC reduction, medication errors and AEs, and near-miss events with subsequent positive impacts on patients’ satisfaction levels. The standard of care, the level of safety that patients are offered, the rate of readmissions, and the cost of therapeutic interventions shall enhance patient compliance with the regime provided in the EHR (D’Amore et al., 2021).
Consequences of Not Conducting a Needs Assessment
Several implications can be determined in an organization for not conducting a need assessment. Such consequences are the selection of the wrong technological advancement, which will offer the patient access to telehealth. This would result in increased efficiency demands by the selected technology on the side of the healthcare provider and the patient. This would endanger the telehealth system to deliver on its mandate of offering quality and safe health care services to the patient to his near miss and adverse event risks being prevented by the health care providers.
This would lead to enhanced disparities in health, causing a rise in readmission rates, downsized satisfaction amongst the patients, and escalated costs in providing therapy coupled with poor adherence to the diverse medications and treatments by the patient. Thus, the hospitals will shift their clients to other superior caregiving organizations that offer efficient and sound healthcare services that are also cheap. This would have a negative economic, financial, and social impact on the hospital due to reduced efficiency compared to competitors Allololy & Sabri, (2022).
Critical Issues in Nursing Care Affecting Patient Outcomes
There are also critical issues about the nursing care being implemented for patients, adversely affecting the patient. Among the challenges that nurses face, the lack of ability to give quality and safe care to the patient remains one of the most crucial factors that result in poor patient health. In therapy, management is problematic since the nurses are incompetent in identifying pharmacological interaction or the impact of change in medication therapy on the patient’s health status.
Lack of knowledge on the part of the nurses, inadequate interprofessional relations, and healthcare professionals’ failure to educate the nurses about the medication therapy plan resulted in medical misadventures, which posed a considerable threat to the patient’s life. This feeds poor results about patient satisfaction and the progression of the ailment.
Another thing that has been reported to be causing poor health among the patients and affecting the conduct of the nursing staff is negligence by the nursing staff of the health facility. This transpires because there is an inadequate number of nurses, which overstretches the available nurses who, through stress gains, make medication mistakes that will compromise the patient’s health, hence the rise in mortality and morbidity (Shang et al., 2020).
Leadership’s Purchase Decisions
Concerns like enhanced patient traits, decreased medical errors, decreased rates of readmission of patients, and overall impacts like mortality and morbidity will help leadership in its purchase decisions. In connection with this, the purchase decision, which is the choice of the technology or devices, the majority of which will be easy to use or have an uncomplicated interface, will be selected by the leaders for introduction into the healthcare system.
Another consideration that the leaders are more likely to consider while making the purchases is how the technology is used to gather, secure, and display patient health information to forecast medication mistakes and unfavorable effects. Apart from this, the leaders can also identify and evaluate the evidence-based practices that can be employed to adopt a specific technology in the healthcare system to deliver safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-centric care initiatives through an EHR.
New Technology
The utilization of new trademarks will assist the nurses in avoiding adverse and near-miss events. The top benefit that can be realized from the EHR system is that it will enable the nurses to forecast any adverse incidents that may arise from drug-drug interchanges that might be fatal to the patient.
When using new technology, the nurses will also be able to easily monitor the patient’s medical condition to predict and thus prevent the occurrence of errors. Another potential feature is an integrated alarm or warning signal that will help the nurses be cautious about possible reactions, reducing mortality and morbidity rates.
The preceding implementation of the EHR system will enable the nurses to assess and determine the 30-day readmission rate of CHF patients. The EHR system will help the nurses get significant statistics on CHF patients receiving treatment at Vila Health. The data will also assist the nurses to understand the efficiency of the treatment offered to the patients.
NURS FPX 6214 Assessment 1 Technology Needs Assessment
The EHR system will also contain information on decreasing medication errors, adverse events, near-miss events, and the 30-day readmission rate for CHF patients who had been treated. This will lead to reduced mortality and morbidity rates in the community and increased satisfaction from the patients treated in the hospital for other ailments in the future. As highlighted by Oliver et al. (2022), the implementation of the EHR system affected the quality of care and EPB intervention that covered the 30-day readmission of heart patients.
Other Perspectives
Another one observed that the need for more knowledge and skills concerning the application of technologies poses a problem in implementing the EHR system among nurses. Because most nurses are fully involved in daily patient care, they need more time to search for technological developments. While implementing an EHR system will relieve some of the pressures on nurses and make their workload less demanding, they are unable to use the EHR themselves because of their tight schedules to learn correctly how to use the said system, thus leading to the denial of effective, safe and quality patient care to their patients.
Safety Requirements and Regulatory Considerations
Concerning the issue of monitoring the 30-day readmission rate, it is essential to consider the requirements for ensuring the safety of individuals receiving services, as well as the regulatory requirements associated with the issue. Some of these considerations exist in the Centre for Medicare and Medicaid Services rulings, and every healthcare center in the United States must observe them. CMS entails readmission rates since it extends health insurance services to patients and sets specific readmission rate periods. If the readmission rates rise to about 20% in the country’s health facilities and 22% in New York within 30 days of the following CHF patient who was a beneficiary of healthcare services at the hospital, instead of the CMS funding the subsequent payment for the readmission rates the hospital is at a disadvantage and saved money back to the patient.
The HRRP or the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program is a program formulated by CMS or Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to prevent the hospital from making intentional mistakes that would endanger the patient’s health, hence the need to be readmitted for treatment. The more days a patient spends in the hospital, the more charges the hospital incurs for the services rendered and, therefore, the more money the hospital earns.
To avoid this, CMS has implemented measures that would only allow hospitals to record low rates of patient readmissions within 30 days of discharge. If not, the hospital is punished for it (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; CMS, 2022). Here, we can use the criteria mentioned above by CMS to determine whether their requirements have been met.
Patient Confidentially and Privacy Protection
First, user data is a critical factor that needs to be considered in any technological interface, precisely patient confidentiality and privacy.
Due to the roles healthcare providers play in handling the information belonging to their clients, they have specific ethical codes that ensure patients’ details cannot be misused or used to cause harm. The various healthcare organizations have set strict measures to be implemented if the privacy and discretion of patients are to be violated.
Significant healthcare associations have established regulations that guarantee that patients’ details are not disclosed to the public since using EHR as a care delivery model curtails patient privacy and confidentiality rights. The HIPAA (Health et al. Act) protects the information of patients being pampered with care using digital healthcare services. It was in 1996 that the Department of Health and Human Services approved a law to safeguard patient information. HIPAA deployed firewalls and safe VPNs that show that patient valuable information was not consented to by the hackers and was not used in wrongdoings.
HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which governs the rules for protecting any patient’s health-related information. HITECH stands for Health et al. for Economic and Clinical Health, which compels the healthcare organization to follow these laws to safeguard the patient’s information. Measures have also been implemented to penalize any violation of patient data, and HIPAA guidelines have minimum penalties of up to $50,000 and ramp up to millions of dollars with imprisonment (ADA, 2023).
Knowledge Gaps
The literature review reveals that there needs to be more awareness of the future risks of using EHR systems. These risks include but are not limited to the following: The EHR system, as noted, has weaknesses that must have put it at high risk of being hacked, given the data it contains. As mentioned earlier, the black market requires information on the patient to be sold at a prohibitive price.
This is so because patient information of a client is their fingerprints, face recognition, and other essential details such as the house address, passport details, and credit card numbers, all of which can be duplication by identity thieves to give acts of fugitives false identity.
Impact of Internal and External Stakeholders
Stakeholders and Their Roles
Relative to stakeholders, these can be divided into internal and external. Healthcare providers are internal stakeholders as they invest their time to provide services for the sick.
They include shareholders, investors, hospital owners, and other individuals with a direct stake in healthcare provision. In contrast, the external stakeholders are individual patients or companies like a drug company, an insurance company, or any other company with a business relationship with the hospital.
This is the fact that their decisions chiefly determine how change will be implemented in the system. Therefore, patient satisfaction from telehealth can help bring telehealth into the healthcare system. Investors and hospital owners base their decisions on the ramifications that telehealth will have on patients and how much financial benefit the hospital stands to receive should such technology be introduced for the betterment of patients. Therefore, the reciprocation of patients and the owners/ investors of the company is crucial in ensuring any alteration in the system (Petkovic et al., 2020). These stakeholders determine the dynamics of the healthcare organization, in this instance, Vila Health.
Engaging Stakeholders in Sustaining a Vision for Change
I would draw the stakeholders, especially the owners of the hospitals, investors, and the patients involved, as a way of sustaining change realization, that is, EHR implementation, to prevent adverse and near-miss events. I would do this for patients by meeting them in sessions and at other conferences and giving information on the nature of EHR and its importance. Print media materials like bulletin boards and pamphlets in graphics will also enhance patients’ knowledge of the importance of EHR.
Concerning hospital owners and investors, a plan to engage stakeholders to support sustaining a vision for change will involve the following activities: Training meetings that will provide overviews and detailed analyses of the benefits of EHR in the healthcare system to engage the stakeholders. EBP will substantiate the provided data and explain how it enhances patient care and hospital safety. The evidence will provide concrete evidence on how the Change would impact the financial and economic status of the hospital (Petkovic et al., 2020).
Assumptions
If the assumption that there will be staff resistance is made, this could be avoided by organizing general sessions at least twice a week to train the staff on the right ways of using the EHR system. This shall enable them to understand why there is resistance when handling advanced technologies, which is the major cause of healthcare providers’ challenges.
The resistance will also be addressed as a new generation of EHR will be ready and used proficiently by medical practitioners. In addition, the hospital can employ an organizational culture policy whereby the nurses/healthcare providers are given incentives to embrace technological advancements by using them in their practices. This would also assist in minimizing resistance to engage the HER among staff following findings from Alanazi et al., 2020.
Conclusion
Overall, the introduction of EHR assisted in reducing adverse events and near-miss occurrences. It highlighted the value of EHR in improving patient care quality and safety. Patients’ satisfaction rose, and the hospital readmission rate within the initial 30 days was also reduced. As this showed, all of this has contributed to the needs assessment at Vila Health.
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NURS FPX 6410 Assessment 1
References
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