Strategic Plan For The Implementation Of An Information System In Curtin Hospital

Current Vision of Curtin Metropolitan Hospital

In the course of this report, the various strategies in relation to the implementation of the information system in the context of the healthcare services of the Curtin Hospital have been discussed. The potentialities and the prospects of the strategies have been discussed along with identification of the limitations and the implementation risks. A delivery timeframe for the implementation of the strategies have also been identified.

The current Vision of Curtin Metropolitan Hospital is to expand the service criteria of the various departments so that more patients be provided medical treatment. It is expected that within 2020, Curtin Hospital would be able to deliver medical service to 50000 patients. The Hospital is aiming to increase major number of seats in the Maternity, Oncology and General Surgery department.

The organisation also have a broad vision of expanding their clientele. After selling 45% of their share to the Commonwealth Medical Institute, the new directorial board has strongly emphasized and recommending to enhance their health information management facility. Again, in order to achieve that the Patient Information department is supposed to made more illustrative

This strategic plan incorporates all the essential requirements that would be required for the future expansion of the hospital. Most importantly, the board of directors in the company have a vision to start delivering the new services as promptly as possible.

The following are the most essential missions for future expansion in the Curtin Metropolitan Hospital:

1. Expansion of the number of beds from 330 to 550.
2. Opening a different outdoor department for General medicine treatment

• Make 2 new plastic surgery OT

1. Enhance the facility of providing Physiotherapy as well as Occupational Therapy
2. Increase the number of patient information clerks by 15
3. The Coding management department have to arrange training session for the electronic database management system handling (maximum time limit 4 months)

• Development of a new mental health care unit with a 200 sets facility and an outdoor unit. This department should have 20 nursing care providers who would deliver community care (outdoor) for mental rehab based in home. In future, this service is to be expanded in future with 100 more nursing care providers.
• Making a broad online patient information data base which can store medical records of the patients registered in Curtin Hospitals for at least 11 years.

The process of heath information management is strictly associated with the enhancement of projected facilities of the hospital. In this context, the strict process of health process management in the hospital is an important factor. The process of health information management in Curtin hospital is really innovative and specialised. At first the process of outsourcing health care can be mentioned. There are not enough doctors and surgeons in the Maternity, Plastic surgery and Paediatric surgery department of the hospital. However, the management have contractual relationship with various doctors and health care service providers in the country. In case, if any such emergency case arrives in these above mentioned departments, the prompt information management of patient information allows the hospital to arrange concerned departmental doctors. The doctors receives a detailed case file of the patients whom they are to deal with, within 6 hours of the arrival of the patient to the hospital. Hence, it becomes very easy for them to decide what is to be done with the patient. The doctors get the data over their online databases. The IT department in the hospital is also proactive in arranging online session with the doctors. There is 24*7 staff availability in the IT department of the hospital.

One major problem in the hospital is that prompt patient service is not possible in every department equally with the current staff limit of the hospital. The general rush of the staff is towards the outpatient department, maternity department and the oncology department. Hence, in Orthopaedics or dermatology or plastic surgery department the amount of attending staff is less. This is because there are only 7 patient information clerk present in the hospital. The patient data collection and communication with the doctors become disrupted as an outcome. Again, there is only one patient release information officer. On top of that the patients’ data regarding the discharge orders are manually accumulated by the seven Patient Information clerks.  As an outcome the release of the various patients are delayed

Missions for Future Expansion in Curtin Metropolitan Hospital

The most important aspect in this aspect is that patient arrival in the hospital is increasing 2to 3% every month and as an impact, the Hospital management is expecting that within the next 2 years the number of annul patient visit would increase to 50000. Besides, the variety of services provided here has increased the demand of seats at the Orthopaedics, Plastic surgery and Outpatient services departments of the hospitals. With the development of adaptive infrastructure for prompt patient information management system the revenue generation rate is expected to rise by 33 to 35% within 2022.

With the acute tendency of rise in number of outdoor patients and the number of patients admitted also, the number of clinical coders stand at 9 so far. With the current patient strength, the current coding manager and the coding trainer also have to wet their hands when some emergency situation arises. This is one serious threat because high work rate of the coders always leaves scope for human error. The permissible limit of human error in medical coding is only 0.05 per 100 patients in Australia. Otherwise this can also give rise to cases of fatality.

The first most important aspect that attracts patients towards any health care centre or any hospital are lower health care providing costs. As an outcome, a strategy of service packaging can be formulated. Based on the details of the patient after primary diagnosis by the doctors, the clinical coders’ team can create health care package for the individual patient. As per Adler-Milstein et al. (2015), this would help the patients to understand what would be the projected steps of treatment and how is the cost distribution for the treatment procedure going to be conducted. However, one limitation in this respect is that the number of members in the team of clinical coders is far less than the threshold limit required for this implementation.

The next strategy is development of a bibliographic database with live doctor assistance. This is a consultation forum whereby the doctors can take the assistance of the health care implementation journals and thus gain valuable ideas to treat the patients. As an outcome of this implementation, influenced from Boulware et al. (2016), it can be opined that the doctors can also provide much better treatment facilities to the patient parties.

The third strategy that can be implemented is setting up of an online portal for the assimilation of all relevant patient information for the tenure during which the patient is staying in the hospitals. In this context a specialised workforce is urgently required who would assess the patient data and generate reports based on the findings of the test results. In order to active that, influenced from Cherry and Jacob (2016), it can be opined that the IT division of the hospital have to hire content development staff and also create a different forum for the storage of such data. This has to be a 24 hours working team with people serving in rotational shifts.

Another important service strategy is development of an online portal for the registration of offsite patients who wants to receive physiotherapy treatment or occupational theory treatment. The health care packaging portal that denotes the price of the various services also indicates the price of these offsite services that would be provided by the nursing care providers of the hospital.

Challenges Faced by Curtin Hospital in the Implementation of the Information System

Lastly, a separate information database have to be developed for the new mental health department that is to start working from 2020 onwards.

Goals: Health Care Packaging	Descriptions
Specific	This goal is specifically required for helping the patients to choose the kinds of medical treatments they want
Measurable	This is measurable by the percentage increase of patient visits per month
Achievable	This task is achievable as the new board of directors endorse it.
Relevant	This relevant because with an increase in number of patients, service delivery would be quick and prompt as an impact of this implementation.
Time-Bound	The time limit is 2 months

Goals: development of Bibliographic Database	Descriptions
Specific	This service is specifically aimed at development of the quality of health care services at the hospital
Measurable	This is measurable by the variety of patients and diseases that can be addressed by the hospital
Achievable	This is slightly difficult to achieve as tis implementation requires an extensive timeframe for infrastructure development.
Relevant	This is relevant as many departments do not have adequately experienced doctors and nurses.
Time-Bound	This is achievable within 1 year

Goals: Development plan for online patients’ information database	Distribution
Specific	This is specifically important for the ease of service of doctors in the hospital
Measurable	The measuring criteria is the feedback of patients and the servicing care providers regarding their experience with the hospital
Achievable	This is easily achievable as this database requires only a registration of a cloud database
Relevant	This is highly relevant as this would serve the hospital to serve maximum number of patients
Time-Bound	The time bound is 8 months

Goals: SMART analysis of mental health database set up	Distribution
Specific	This goal is specifically required for the new facility
Measurable	It would be directly proportional to the density of patient visit
Achievable	This is achievable as the management have to compulsorily develop a database for information management also.
Relevant	This is relevant as mental cure cases are recorded for future case analyses.
Time-Bound	The time limit is 6 months

Goals: registration software of registration for physiotherapy and occupational therapy	Distribution
Specific	This is urgently required for starting this service.
Measurable	This is measurable by the patients’ feedback for the service
Achievable	This is easily achievable as this plan is inclusive of the implementation framework of the directors
Relevant	This is relevant as the service would depend entirely on the registration software
Time-Bound	This project is expected to be finished within 4 months

The first risk is that the online data can be breached through the loopholes of the intranet connectivity. It is also possible that the coders can leak the data to other parties with interests. Again, the risk in case of the setup of the database is that the current employees are not experienced with handling of online software. The company must also provide training sessions to the IT team and the content development team of the hospital. Another potential risk is that the new employees cannot handle the pressure of the 50000 patients annually. As an impact, influenced from Dietz et al. (2015), it can be opined that this is a critical risk factor for an industry like the healthcare. In order to mitigate this risk, the company have to form a group of advisory panel, which would be indulging in planning development training for the employees.

Conclusion

Analysing the decision making trends of the new formed board of directors of the company, it can be opined that the implementation is a big restructuring of the form of the organisation. Again, it can be also commented that the company have planned to create an alternative revenue channel. Furthermore, analysis of the implementation policy reveals that the tasks related to the strategies have to be accomplished in a very stringent timeframe.

Reference List

Adler-Milstein, J., DesRoches, C. M., Kralovec, P., Foster, G., Worzala, C., Charles, D., … & Jha, A. K. (2015). Electronic health record adoption in US hospitals: progress continues, but challenges persist. Health affairs, 34(12), 2174-2180.

Boulware, L. E., Cooper, L. A., Ratner, L. E., LaVeist, T. A., & Powe, N. R. (2016). Race and trust in the health care system. Public health reports.

Cherry, B., & Jacob, S. R. (2016). Contemporary nursing: Issues, trends, & management. Elsevier Health Sciences.

Dietz, W. H., Baur, L. A., Hall, K., Puhl, R. M., Taveras, E. M., Uauy, R., & Kopelman, P. (2015). Management of obesity: improvement of health-care training and systems for prevention and care. The Lancet, 385(9986), 2521-2533.

Furukawa, M. F., King, J., Patel, V., Hsiao, C. J., Adler-Milstein, J., & Jha, A. K. (2014). Despite substantial progress in EHR adoption, health information exchange and patient engagement remain low in office settings. Health Affairs, 33(9), 1672-1679.

Lian, J. W., Yen, D. C., & Wang, Y. T. (2014). An exploratory study to understand the critical factors affecting the decision to adopt cloud computing in Taiwan hospital. International Journal of Information Management, 34(1), 28-36.

Madathil, K. C., Rivera-Rodriguez, A. J., Greenstein, J. S., & Gramopadhye, A. K. (2015). Healthcare information on YouTube: a systematic review. Health informatics journal, 21(3), 173-194.

McPherson, R. A., & Pincus, M. R. (2017). Henry’s Clinical Diagnosis and Management by Laboratory Methods E-Book. Elsevier Health Sciences.

Powers, M. A., Bardsley, J., Cypress, M., Duker, P., Funnell, M. M., Fischl, A. H., … & Vivian, E. (2017). Diabetes self-management education and support in type 2 diabetes: a joint position statement of the American Diabetes Association, the American Association of Diabetes Educators, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. The Diabetes Educator, 43(1), 40-53.

Sultan, N. (2014). Making use of cloud computing for healthcare provision: Opportunities and challenges. International Journal of Information Management, 34(2), 177-184.

Urden, L. D., Stacy, K. M., & Lough, M. E. (2017). Critical Care Nursing-E-Book: Diagnosis and Management. Elsevier Health Sciences.

Wang, Y., Kung, L., & Byrd, T. A. (2018). Big data analytics: Understanding its capabilities and potential benefits for healthcare organizations. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 126, 3-13.

Weaver, C. A., Ball, M. J., Kim, G. R., & Kiel, J. M. (2016). Healthcare information management systems. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Zingg, W., Holmes, A., Dettenkofer, M., Goetting, T., Secci, F., Clack, L., … & Pittet, D. (2015). Hospital organisation, management, and structure for prevention of health-care-associated infection: a systematic review and expert consensus. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 15(2), 212-224.