Free Essay On Evaluating The EMR System

Changes in an organization can have a variety of outcomes. The changes can brings success to an organization and make sure the organization is on its right path of achieving its goals and vision. Change can also act as motivation to the staffs in that it makes the work of the staffs easy and flexible. However, change can also result in disaster in the company in form of losses or disruptions of the normal activities. Furthermore, change can also be a diversion from the path of realizing the organization’s visions and goals (Takian et al., 2012) Thus, to know the value of change is better to evaluate the impact of the change to the normal activities of the organization.
Two years ago the hospital went through drastic changes from the paper records to the EMR system. It is important to acknowledge that the hospital had used the paper record system for years. Thus, it was not an easy task to convert large volumes of data from hardcopy to softcopy. Additionally, the staffs also had to go through training to get the important skills on how to use the new system. The aim of this evaluation plan is to ascertain the milestones the new system has been able to make in the span of two years. This will give the management and other stakeholders the true picture of how the system has been able to perform. The evaluation will also give light to the challenges the system has face since it was implemented. However, the evaluation will take a keen look at the impact of the EMR system on the cost, quality, and patient satisfaction. These are the most essential area of the system. The result of the evaluation will be presented to the management for further decision making on the future of the system. In addition, the findings of the evaluation exercise will also be posted on the hospital website and newsletter for all the stakeholders to have a look at the report.
The cost of the system will be evaluated by the checking the actual cost of purchasing and shipping of the system equipments from the provider premises to the hospital premises. Moreover, the cost of installation of the system and training of staffs on how to use the system will be evaluated and add to the total cost. The hospital also had to hire new staffs who were given the responsible of managing the system. Hence, this acted as additional cost to the hospital, thus, it has to be evaluated to see if the hospital has been able to sustain the additional salary to the new technicians (Pinsonneault et al., 2012). The purchase price, the training cost, and the cost of installing the new system will be evaluated against the initial budget to check whether they hospital spent more or less than on what was in the budgeted for the system. Salary and maintenance will also be evaluated separately since are recurring expenditures. However, the evaluation committee will check whether the hospital is able to sustain these recurring expenditures in the long run.
The quality of the system will be check and evaluated by how efficient and effective the activities and service delivery of the hospital are compared to the past before the system was installed. The evaluation team will also check how many times the system has broken down and how long it takes to restore it. The quality will also be assessed by the number of features, speed, durability and the storage capacity of the whole system (Pinsonneault et al., 2012). The team will also conduct interviews on staffs to get their comments on how they feel in using the system. The committee will also check the current systems in the market and those used by other hospitals and compare them with the system used by the hospital.
Patient satisfaction can be assessed and evaluated through conducting a survey. Thus, the evaluation team must carry a survey to get patient feedback on the new system. Evaluation team will identify patients who have been able to use the paper system and the EMR system. Interviews and questionnaires will be used to get patients opinion whether service delivery has improved, if they feel secure using the new system and what they think should be done to make service delivery better (Rutten et al., 2014)
The management of the hospital is a very essential element for the success of the evaluation exercise since they play a big role. The role of the management is allocating the necessary resources to the evaluation team. The management is also required to give permission to workers to take part in the evaluation process. The workers who are needed by the evaluation team to answer to questions or give their opinion concerning the system should be allowed by the management without facing any disciplinary action (Takian et al., 2012).

Reference

Brown, A., & Green, T. D. (2011). The Essentials of Instructional Design: Connecting Fundamental.
Pinsonneault, A., Dakshinamoorthy, V., Reidel, K., & Tamblyn, R. (2012, January). The impact of IT on quality of care: Evaluation of an integrated chronic disease management system. In System Science (HICSS), 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 2947-2956). IEEE.
Rutten, L. J. F., Vieux, S. N., St Sauver, J. L., Arora, N. K., Moser, R. P., Beckjord, E. B., & Hesse, B. W. (2014). Patient perceptions of electronic medical records use and ratings of care quality. Patient related outcome measures, 5, 17.
Takian, A., Petrakaki, D., Cornford, T., Sheikh, A., & Barber, N. (2012). Building a house on shifting sand: methodological considerations when evaluating the implementation and adoption of national electronic health record systems. BMC health services research, 12(1), 105.