Pay for performance is the concept of compensating employees by their performance (Rynes, Gerhart & Minette, 2004). The strategy allows organizations to enhance job performance by ensuring that employees dedicate their skills and knowledge fully to the success of a firm. Pay for performance encourages the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by creating the need for increased quality output. As a form of advanced technology, EMR leads to increased efficiency in the health sector. As a result, it allows employees to execute their duties more efficiently and at a faster rate. In a work environment that focuses on merit pay, EPR would lead to significant improvement in both work output and employee compensation.
Cost is one of the most critical factors to consider when making an IT adoption decision. The cost of product matters in two ways. Firstly, buyers should look at the overall price of a system. Financial limitations cannot be ignored (Tan, Payton & Tan, 2010). Organizations purchase systems that they can afford. At the same it, it is important to purchase a reliable system. Compromising quality with the aim of spending less can lead to excessive spending in the long run. Secondly, the maintenance costs should be a matter of concern. Some systems require annual upgrade fee, continuous renewal of license and support fees. Other systems are difficult to learn, and they need a firm to hire an external consultant to educate the staff.
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The decision to continue with the use of paper records would have been extremely costly. The use of paper records had already become a cumbersome routine for the Dryden Family Medicine staff. As the number of patients expanded gradually, more records were being created. Also, more activities and Medicare requirement made the culture of paper records more complex (Tan, Payton & Tan, 2010). The health center decided to adopt EMR for increased efficiency. EMR led to significant changes including improved task performance, delivery of better services to patients, systematic preservation of data, execution of tasks in lesser time, and automation of many activities. These achievements show that Dryden Family needed EMR desperately. Clearly, without EMR, problems such as medication errors, time wastage, loss of data, poor recording of customer information, poor disease management, inability to advance patient education, and inability to work remotely would have persisted.
EMR implementation requires a practice group to be well prepared. IT systems are expensive and once installed they must generate value for a firm. Accordingly, as a firm parts with installation and execution fees, it must be ready to utilize the system fully. Readiness for an IT system can only be defined regarding demands. In other words, the system should come to fill a need. As a practice group acquires more patients and expands its activities, its operations become more complex. Paper records begin to create unnecessary difficulties concerning accessibility and tracking. Data accuracy and timely recording and retrieving of information also become a challenge. Although all these aspects may appear as limitations, they are the needs that push for the adoption of EMR.
Lastly, adoption and implementation of EMR are more favorable for large health organizations because they experience more challenges concerning paper records. However, both large and small scale health organizations can experience increased benefits or challenges depending on their effectiveness when it comes to utilization of EMR technology. For example, Dryden Family Medicine is a relatively small firm that experienced significant financial improvements after adopting EMR (Tan, Payton & Tan, 2010). Furthermore, its employees were able to execute their responsibilities more successfully.
References
Rynes, S. L., Gerhart, B., & Minette, K. A. (2004). The importance of pay in employee motivation: Discrepancies between what people say and what they do. Human resource management , 43 (4), 381-394.
Tan, J. K. H., Payton, F. C., & Tan, J. K. H. (2010). Adaptive health management information systems: Concepts, cases, and practical applications . Sudbury, Mass: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.
