Introduction
The need for the medical facilities to offer quality healthcare services to their customers has resulted in discoveries of different forms of reforms and initiatives, leading to various healthcare organizations achieving their goals and objectives. Because of changes that have been happening in payment methods, service delivery, and health record management, healthcare costs have resulted in the care of the patient in non-hospital settings across the world. Different healthcare departments such as Assisted Living depend on the accuracy of health records, integrity, reliability, and accessibility to provide quality healthcare services and reimbursement reasons (Aloini et al., 2018).
The high number of medical errors that have been witnesses that have been happening during the documentation of documents has led to the adaption of new technologies within the healthcare facilities. The proposal discuss the medical issues witnessed at Atrium Health Organization that hinder the provision of quality services, and the quality improvement proposed to address the issue.
Overview of the Issue
The healthcare organization has been undertaking more operations to offer quality services to their customers through quality improvement initiatives and address medical errors in the medical facilities. The proposal is to help the healthcare organization offer quality services and the facility’s management to focus on using patients’ medical records across all the departments. Analyzing, protecting patient data, and offering quality services are the primary objectives for most medical facilities; offering patient-centered services is the primary focus for healthcare facilities. (Li et al., 2018). For many years the healthcare organization has enjoyed using various health information technologies like Electronic Management Records (HER) and the CPOE systems.
According to the latest research done by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), over 1.1 million patients die every year because of medical errors (Rahman & Khan, 2019). The mistakes are very costly to the healthcare organization, and more than 15 million is spent every year to come up with solutions to such issues (Randhawa & Ahuja, 2017).
Reasons for Quality Improvement Proposed
Appropriate technology implementation is essential for healthcare originations to offer quality and affordable services. One of the challenges facing Atrium Health Organization related to quality healthcare services provided to the clients by nurses is implementing the quality improvement imitative. The medical errors from healthcare facilities have resulted in new approaches for using new technologies to enhance accuracy and provide patient information for diagnosis and treatment.
Technology such as EHR and CPOE approaches have helped provide quality healthcare services to patients. The two technology approaches are instrumental in transmitting data regarding patients’ treatment guidelines and medications transferred electronically through computers.
Support from the Previous Research about Quality Improvement Initiative
Improvements in healthcare services have been a primary goal for different medical organizations because of increased demand for quality services by patients, which has increased with chronic disease, which demands more attention from healthcare providers. Previous research has supported the initiative to enhance quality services, resulting in patient’s outcome (Rahman & Khan, 2019). Quality improvements offer patients access to quality medical services, improving patients’ health status, boosting immunity to different payment methods.
Quality improvements initiative has impacted the community, and the industry has helped increase morality in the community. Much development has been witnessed in the community because people can now live healthy and robust life (Randhawa & Ahuja, 2017). Digital health record management has helped different medical facilities spend fewer resources on inpatient record management because it requires fewer resources to implement.
Electronic Healthcare records are helpful in the transactions of business details within the healthcare facilities compared to the manual history, which derails business records development. The community income is affected by the quality improvements used. A healthy community is always rich because they do not spend their money on medical expenses but spend them on other development projects within the community (Li et al., 2018). Electronic Health Record is easy to monitor the increase of sales, which is very difficult to detect when using manual records.
Steps in Implementing Quality Improvement Initiatives
The success of the QI initiative depends on the organization following the required steps, planning for the implementation is necessary, management of available resources such as finance is essential. Here are the steps for implementation:
- Work on the budget for implementation.
- Training stakeholders participating.
- Imposing adoption culture to the system.
- Clarifying benefits that will result from the initiative.
- Test of the technology before it is implemented.
Evaluation for Improvement
Evaluation of any project that has been implemented is essential to establish whether it is working or not. To understand the effectiveness of quality improvement initiatives to the healthcare facility, then evaluation is necessary. QI initiative is expected to enhance healthcare delivery services, and several ways will be used to evaluate the process. The manager at Atrium Healthcare Organization used the results from measure metrics to evaluate improvements of services at the healthcare facility (Aloini et al., 2018). The outcome measure is essential for the improved services offered because it depends on the feedback given by the patient after receiving healthcare services. Outcome measure allows the manager to compare the standard provided to the patient if they match the outcome.
When making healthcare organizations, it is essential to focus on the quality services delivered to the patients. Balancing the measure is very useful and can be applied to determine whether MHR systems are helpful to the health facility. A balancing measure is necessary to help different organizations ensure that new changes are not affected by other parts of the system.
Identifying the Test
QI initiative focuses on the experimentation and implementation of the proposed solution to an existing issue. The success of the proposed solution will be determined by the size and complexity of the QI it has offered. It will be appropriate to conduct several small and large tests depending on the situation at hand (Helbig, 2018). Atrium Health Organization can decide to use patients suffering from different diseases from the facility to test the hypothesis and confirm the QI initiative’s success. To ensure the thesis on the study, the healthcare facility decided to use 30 patients from different departments, and they used the t-test sampling method.
Results obtained from the null hypothesis indicated that the population and the sample average resemble the outcome received (Aloini et al., 2018). The sample mean is higher than the population mean, and from the experiment, the hypothesized population was eighty. The clients who were attended to using the system displayed signs of improvement compared to the patients who did not use the system.
Conclusion
The essay demonstrates that for healthcare organizations to offer quality services to their clients, they must consider several essential factors for their success. The approaches such as MHR have enhanced more accessible work at Atrium Health Organization because the healthcare facility can enter data and orders to make sure that patients take less time to receive healthcare services. The combination of health information and MHR systems has enhanced the easy implementation and success of MHR. Medical facilities should focus on robust information systems and approaches to ensure that MHRV is fully implemented. The performance metrics remain the most critical aspect in the medical facilities to measure the QI. Leadership and responsibilities are essential for implementing the MHR approach in medical facilities because of their complexity and sophistication.
References
Aloini, D., Cannavacciuolo, L., Gitto, S., Lettieri, E., Malighetti, P., & Visintin, F. (2018). Evidence-based management for performance improvement in healthcare. Management Decision. Web.
Helbig, J. (2018). Statistical analysis. In J. Ambrose, J. Helbig, C. Ryan, & E. Torres (Eds.) Applied statistics for health care. Grand Canyon University.
Li, S. A., Jeffs, L., Barwick, M., & Stevens, B. (2018). Organizational contextual features that influence the implementation of evidence-based practices across healthcare settings: A systematic integrative review. Systematic Reviews, 7(1), 1-19. Web.
Rahman, N., & Khan, S. (2019). Circular dichroism spectroscopy: A facile approach for quantitative analysis of captopril and study of its degradation. ACS Omega, 4(2), 4252-4258. Web.
Randhawa, J. S., & Ahuja, I. S. (2017). 5S–a quality improvement tool for sustainable performance: Literature review and directions. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management. Web.