Healthcare organizations understand the importance of effective Information systems and how such policies have impacted the delivery of care. Consequently, multiple corporations have majored in manufacturing and supplying health information technology (HIT) hardware, devices and solutions. An example of an EHR from Cerner Corporation is the Cerner EMR, which is a tool belonging to a collection of EHR systems that are unified with other clinical solutions designed to streamline physicians' and nurses’ workflow enhance the safety of the patient and reduce the costs.
Cerner Corporation is a HIT developing company. The company has majored in developing information systems for the organization over the years. The company’s products are being used by more than 27,000 health facilities across the world. Established in 1979, Cerner Co. its popularity grew in the 1980s and 90s. Cerner Co. has its headquarters in Kansas, Missouri.
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EHR systems users are physicians and nurses in different health systems. Physicians and nurses use the Cerner EHR systems to record various kinds of information about the patients on the orders. Nurses and doctors document or store and share information using the HER systems, which works to benefit parties who may require the information in a healthcare setting. In a health setting the EHR systems are used by caregivers for research, documentation, billing and administrative purposes.
EHR systems have been accepted in almost all organizations. The adoption of the systems in healthcare settings helps in delivering improved care. EHR systems have been used to improve the health and wellness of the patient by reducing patients’ errors and supporting better outcomes for the patient. With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it meant that most people in the U.S had an opportunity to receive health care. Consequently, it would be easier to share the collect patients’ records who were using the ACA using the EHR systems and being able to use the information for multiple purposes. The implementation of EHR technologies in health settings introduces some hazards which affect the safety of the records the patients-physicians partnership in the implementation of the EHR as patients are concerned about their privacy which can easily be bleached using EHR systems ( Sulmasy et al., 2017) .
Rationale
The health information systems, such as the Electronic Health Record (EHR) are meant to improve safety, efficiency, and quality while reducing the disparities that exist in health. They improve patient care and outcome, care coordination, allow practices for an increase in their efficiency, as well as reducing expenditure financially. Crawford et al. (2019), explained in their research that Cerner is the EHR system most used in the world across outpatient, Emergency Department (ED) systems for labs, review of the forms of orders, viewing of results, and charting and documentation, and inpatient. The research found out that the Cerner system is faster in the documentation of the health information by the physicians.
According to Monica (2017), Cerner was favoured by the department of the veteran affairs in the United States to replace its Vista EHR system a clear indication of the effectiveness of the system. The system facilitates the safe transition of care across the military spectrum to include the theatre, en route care, and the garrison. In 2007, the health management system of Cerner saw some continued success since it was deployed by two large health systems. The system improves care management for 12 million-plus patient interactions that take place annually at all the care sites that are part of the Carolinas HealthCare System (Monica, 2017).
Cerner’s health information systems have also been widely utilized in disease management programs which are comprehensive which helps the physicians to engage with the patients better in their health management to improve outcomes among those patients who have chronic conditions. The Cerner system provides coordinated and efficient services and is designed to enhance the safety and health of patients while improving the productivity of the clinicians as indicated by (Monica, 2017).
According to Al Alawi et al. (2014), when implementing a Cerner EHR system, it is essential to inform the users about the purpose of using the system and also about the audit tools and purpose of using the audits to reduce the negative perceptions about the system. The system should be maintained and improvements made to ensure the confidentiality of the patients' information as well as the ease of using it.
Organizations that have this system in place have reported a decrease in medication errors, duplicated orders, omission, transcription, and wrong-patient errors also reduced. The system also has been reported to prevent medication administration mismatch and led to a reduction of the combined telephone and verbal orders all of which are ethical issues associated with most other EHR systems (Ministry of Health, 2017).
Implications for the Practice Change
The Cerner’s EHR systems implementation for a facility that has had an outdated system or no EHR system is beneficial in multiple ways. The EHR system is helpful because it helps provide better health care by improving different aspects of patient care including communication, safety, equity, timeliness, efficiency, patient-centeredness’ and effectiveness ( Adler ‐ Milstein, Everson, & Lee, 2015) .
For a health organization to adopt a Cerner's EHR system, there are costs to be incurred. An organization must have the personnel and equipment in place that can accommodate Cerner's EHR software. Thus in the implementation process, health facilities are required to identify the staff, equipment and budgetary requirements for the new system. Personnel requirements are that the Information technology system Personnel in an organization need to implement to have the knowledge and technical skills to operate computers. These persons are also to be trained on how to use the new EHR system. A healthcare organization must have the equipment in place that can accommodate the EHR system and can efficiently be used if the old technology system cannot efficiently be used to apply the Cerner’s EHR systems. The budgetary estimations $400,000 for the Cerner’s EHR system. The process of acquiring, installing, training and personnel in an organization can be equal to around $1.5 million.
The implementation of Cerner’s EHR system in a healthcare setting will require formal training for the nurses on how to use it. Cerner’s staff must be able to provide the training to train administrative nurses and physicians in hospitals on how to use the systems. In return, the trained nurses and physicians have a responsibility to teach all other hospital staff who will be using the technology ( Adler ‐ Milstein, Everson, & Lee, 2015) . Both nurses and physicians need the training on EHR because they are the ones to use it. The discipline of physicians and nurses would be accomplished after taking tests on how to use the systems, and the majority of the physicians and nurses were able to use it with ease.
Implementation and interprofessional Collaboration
Introducing a new information system provides the means of providing the data and structure to support evidence-based interprofessional practices. Such a system would include the digital infrastructure aimed at improving the capacity to capture delivery process data, clinical data, and data on financials for better health care, new knowledge as well as system improvement. The system would support interprofessional practices through providing solutions to address the utility of data that would promote the capturing of clinical data and the analysis for knowledge generation (White, Kuziemsky, & Brandt, 2015). The system would also contain more structures to allow for the incorporation of patient care models that are new such as the interprofessional team models which would meet the interprofessional team needs of communication, information flow, and workflow.
A new health information system allows for Interprofessional Collaboration in providing healthcare services and in developing competencies for core collaboration. The players who implement the new information health system successful include the hospital staff, the health providers themselves, and the information department of the hospital as well as the clinicians. The team needs to be trained to ensure they understand all the aspects of the system. The government can also be included, primarily if the order is being implemented for a public hospital. The ministry of health also needs to be added, mainly because it needs to have information on different health activities.
The system can be implemented smoothly through planning appropriately by engaging with the suppliers as well as other organizations that have implemented the system and ensuring that there are open channels of communication between the users and the management. The right infrastructure should also be developed during planning (Cresswell, Bates, & Sheikh, 2013). Attention should be given to the software systems so that the system works optimally when implemented. The appropriate infrastructure would ensure increased wireless connection through increasing the speed of the system an essential factor in determining its adoption and success. The staff should also be trained before the implementation of the system to ensure that they remember the essential functions of the order once it is implemented.
Implementing a new health information system is a process that takes time. The timeline should not be anything less than three years due to the time taken before launch, before going live, going and after going live. The implementation should be kept on track through piloting in the conference room in which the subject matter experts together with the users and the process experts meet in a conference room, talk about the process while demonstrating it.
Evaluation and Summary
Evaluating the progress would begin with an assessment of the existing and the anticipated individual and organizational workflows, monitoring of the undesired and desired consequences as well as the tracking of the innovative ways of working (Cresswell, Bates, & Sheikh, 2013). Real-time and longitudinal data collection strategies that provide feedback that is formative is desirable since the emerging results are incorporated in the implementation. External and internal benchmarks should be used to determine the success of the application. External benchmarks compare against the competitors while internal compares against the organization's projects. The EHR systems project implementation into hospital care is essential as it impacts the work output of the healthcare providers and also improves the patients’ outcomes. EHR system eliminates errors and promotes record keeping and information sharing, thus making it easy for patients to receive care. From a historical studies perspective, the implementation of EHR systems is per government laws or policies like ACA. Implementing the project would help the organization in keeping and storing information such as those people who seek health services and are under the ACA program. Such numbers are vital for the hospital and the government at large as it is possible to conduct researches and be able to budget. The ethical aspects that would be impacted by enacting the systems are the privacy of the information stored and shared using the EHR system ( Ozair et al., 2015) .
References
Adler ‐ Milstein, J., Everson, J., & Lee, S. Y. D. (2015). EHR adoption and hospital performance: time ‐ related effects. Health services research , 50 (6), 1751-1771.
Al Alawi, S., Al Dhaheri, A., Al Baloushi, D., Al Dhaheri, M., & Prinsloo, E. A. (2014). Physician user satisfaction with an electronic medical records system in primary healthcare centres in Al Ain: a qualitative study. BMJ Open , 4 (11), e005569.
Crawford, S., Kushner, I., Wells, R., & Monks, S. (2019). Electronic Health Record Documentation Times among Emergency Medicine Trainees. Perspectives in health information management , 16 (Winter).
Cresswell, K. M., Bates, D. W., & Sheikh, A. (2013). Ten key considerations for the successful implementation and adoption of large-scale health information technology. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association , 20 (e1), e9-e13.
Ministry of Health. (December 12 th , 2017). Review of Island Health’s IHealth Electronic Health Record System. Retrieved from https://www.health.gov.bc.ca/library/publications/year/2017/review-of-Island-Health-IHealth-electronic-health-record-system.pdf
Monica, K. (2017). Most significant Epic, Cerner health IT achievements of 2017. Available at:)(Accessed April 24, 2019) https://ehrintelligence. com/news/most-significant-epic-Cerner-health-it-achievements-of-2017 View in Article .
Ozair, F. F., Jamshed, N., Sharma, A., & Aggarwal, P. (2015). Ethical issues in electronic health records: A general overview. Perspectives in clinical research , 6 (2), 73.
Sulmasy, L. S., López, A. M., Horwitch, C. A., & American College of Physicians Ethics, Professionalism, and Human Rights Committee. (2017). Ethical implications of the electronic health record: in the service of the patient. Journal of general internal medicine , 32 (8), 935-939.
White Delaney, C., Kuziemsky, C., & Brandt, B. F. (2015). Integrating informatics and interprofessional education and practice to drive healthcare transformation. Journal of interprofessional care , 29 (6), 527-529.
