Case Study
Read the following case study:
A small community hospital in the Midwest has used a homegrown information system for years. The system began in the early 1970s with a financial module. Over time, additional modules were added. A limited number of departments selected a commercial system and interfaces were used to integrate these into the overall functionality of the hospital information system. Except for physicians, most in-house clinical or care-related documentation is online. However, about 15% to 20% of this documentation is done by free text and is not effectively searchable. In addition, the screens, including the drop-down and default values, were built using terms selected by the in-house development team in consultation with clinical staff; thus there is no data dictionary or specific standard language. In the last few years, the hospital has purchased two outpatient clinics (obstetrics and mental health) and a number of local doctor practices. The clinics and doctors’ offices are now being converted to the hospital administrative systems. A few of the clinical applications that are tied directly to the administrative systems such as order entry and results reporting are also being installed.
A major change is being planned. A new chief information officer (CIO) was hired last year and she has appointed a chief medical information officer (CMIO) and a chief nursing information officer (CNIO). No other significant staff changes were made. With her team in place, one of the CIO’s firs
t activities was to complete an inventory of all applications. Rather than continue to build, a decision was made to switch to a commercial vendor and the hospital selected a commercial system.
As a member of the clinical staff with informatics education, the CIO has requested that you develop a training and information presentation for the clinical staff that will:
1· Identify two or more issues with the existing system
2· Provide staff with appropriate “work-around” for using the existing system
3· Provide an overview of two of the standard languages used within the new system including discipline or specialty, updating frequency, and available cross-maps
– One standard language should pertain only to nursing
– One standard language should be multidisciplinary.
4· Obtain clinical staff input, using a five-question survey, of specific methods to support transition to the new system; questions should be open-ended.
PowerPoint Presentation
Directions:
1. Review the case study.
2. Download the provided PowerPoint template to create a presentation that includes:
· Your name on the title slide of the presentation
· Identification of two or more issues with existing system
· Identification of “work-a-round” solutions when using existing system
· Overview of standard language used only in nursing
· Overview of multidisciplinary standard language
· Set of five (5) open-ended survey questions for staff input on transitioning to the new system
Presentation is free of spelling and grammar errors.