The role of nurses in the modern healthcare setting is increasingly becoming critical as they find themselves in a situation where they have to be involved in decision-making processes to save lives of patients. Unlike before when nurses had to wait for directives from the doctors, nurses in the modern society are expected to have skills that can enable them to help save the life of a patient, especially in emergency cases when a medical doctor is not around. Information is critical in the work of nurses today.
To deliver quality services to their patients, they must be equipped with the right information about the patient. They should know what should be done at specific intervals (Dua, Acharya, & Dua, 2014). That is why when handing over a patient from one nurse to another, there is always a record that is often left so that the incoming nurse can know how to handle the patient. In this project, the focus will be to improve data management system and communication among the nurses at ABC Healthcare Center as a way of enhancing smooth handover of patients from one nurse to the other and reducing the workload of the nurses.
Long and Short-Range Objectives
When undertaking a project, it is important to outline the objectives to make it possible to assess whether the outcome meets the desired standards. It is important to outline both the short and long-term objectives for this project. The long-term objectives for the project are as stated below.
- To help solve the problem of understaffing of nurses without necessarily hiring new nurses at ABC Healthcare Center.
- To transform data management processes and communication among the nurses as a way of enhancing quality of service delivery.
- To empower nurses at ABC Healthcare Center by providing them with the right information and making consultation among nurses simple and efficient.
To achieve the above long-term objectives, a number of short-term goals will have to be accomplished. The following are the short-term objectives for this project.
- To phase out the current ineffective communication systems used by nurses at ABC Healthcare Center to ease their work.
- To train the nurses on how to use the new data management and communication system to enhance the quality of their work.
- To inculcate team spirit and commitment towards having a united approach of handling their duties.
Purpose
The current data management and communication system at ABC Healthcare System is partially computerized. Although there are computer systems used to record and transfer patient’s data, there are instances where nurses opt to use paper records, which they consider more efficient in their work.
The purpose of this project is to completely computerize the system at this facility and eliminate the paperwork. The project seeks to ease the work of nurses so that the burden they have can be reduced to enable them deliver quality services. The expected outcome is a platform where nurses would find it easy making electronic records of their observation and storing them in databases where other nurses and doctors can have access at any time and without strain. The new system is expected to make the process of handing over patients from one nurse to the other simple and effective.
Environmental Assessment
This project seeks to introduce a change in the manner in which data is managed and how medical staffs communicate within this hospital. It is expected that there will be both internal and external factors in the current environment that may facilitate or inhibit the change. It is important to look at these factors.
External Environmental Factors
Facilitating factors
President George W. Bush signed an Executive Order 13335 in 2004 that created ONCHIT (Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) (Tavana, Ghapanchi, & Talaei-Khoei, 2015). This was a direct commitment of the political leaders to support automation of the healthcare sector in the country. The emerging technologies have also facilitated automation of healthcare records by introducing gadgets and programs for data management and communication.
Inhibiting factors
The high cost of some of the gadgets needed for the automation process sometimes slows down the automation process as the stakeholders struggle to fund such processes. Another big inhibitor in the external environment is the hacking problem. Some hospitals are slow when it comes to automating their systems because of the fear of possible hackers that may steal important data or interfere with it in a way that may have devastating consequences.
Internal Environmental Factors
Facilitating factors
In the firm’s internal environment, the biggest facilitating factor is the commitment by the top management of the facility to embrace the emerging technologies. Employees of this firm are often taken through regular trainings, which means that they will find using the new systems easy. The institution also has regular funding from the government and other charitable institutions that it can use to support the project.
Inhibiting factors
The biggest inhibitor within the internal environment is the employees’ reluctance to embrace the emerging change. The fear of the unknown often makes employees resist change (Nelson & Staggers, 2014). The project may also be affected if the targeted health experts fail to learn how to use the new system as soon as possible. Existence of other equally important projects may strain the resources needed to fund this project. The management may opt to fund those other projects, especially if they are considered more important.
Current Workflow
Nurses at ABC Healthcare Center often find themselves under pressure and overstretched trying to meet the increasing needs of the patients. Currently, the records of the patients are taken electronically when they visit this facility. For patients in the wards, nurses often take records of their observations, using a paper and pen, before transferring their data to the system’s database after every round. They consider that process simple, but the truth is that they end up doing the same job twice. Sometimes the paper records may be dropped and lost, forcing them to go and redo the observation or make up data based on the past records.
According to Hoyt and Yoshihashi (2014), there are cases when incoming nurses find absolutely no data left by the nurses who were in the previous shift, making their work very complex. It is disastrous making up patient’s data because they may be subjected to wrong medication that may worsen their conditions. The new system seeks to eliminate such problems. Nurses will take their records electronically, and the information will be transferred to the database in real time. Accuracy of the data will be improved and the work of the nurses will be simplified.
Options for Improving the Process
The management can decide to address the current problem using two options. The first option would be to hire more nurses at this facility to ensure that the workload on the individual nurse is significantly reduced. The main benefit of this option is that patients will be given personalized attention. Nurses will feel relieved, as the number of patients they will be taking care of per a given shift will be reduced. Coordinating teamwork under such an environment will be easy because these nurses will understand their patients at a personal level. However, the cost of hiring new nurses will be high. It is more costly to hire more nurses than to embrace the emerging technologies.
The second option will be to automate the system as recommended in this project. This option emphasizes on the need to automate the entire system of data management to ease the pressure on the nurses (Braunstein, 2015). Nurses will be recording their observation electronically at the wards when observing the patients, eliminating the need to redo that work after making their rounds of observation. This method is less costly compared to the above option. It also enhances accuracy in data management. However, the initial cost of installing the required gadgets may be high.
Preferred Option and Rationale
The two options discussed above have their advantages and disadvantages. However, the preferred option is the automation of the system. The rationale of choosing this option is that it allows this facility to maximize the resources it has to deliver high quality services to the patients. Instead of spending more money by hiring new nurses, this approach makes the work of the current nurses easy, eliminating the pressure they had in meeting the expectations of the patients (Maeder & Martin-Sanchez, 2012).
The approach is also in line with the government policies that require healthcare institutions to automate their systems. When implemented appropriately, it will ensure that there is accurate recording of patients’ information and efficient storage and sharing of patients’ data by the medical staff.
Implementation Plan
Implementation of this plan is very critical in ensuring that it achieves the targeted goal. The table below is a summary of the timeline of various activities and the stakeholders responsible.
Table 1: Timeline of the scheduled activities.
As shown above, the first step will be proposal development that will be done by the project leader. Within the month of March, the proposal should be fully developed and ready for presentation before the management of this facility. The management will go through the proposal and make its approval in the month of April. The management can suggest changes, which may be necessary to make the project more efficient.
If the management makes the needed approval, the next stage will be for the project leader and project members to identify the vendors who can offer the needed system at the best price. Identifying a number of vendors may be necessary so that the most qualified vendor is selected. After identifying a number of vendors, the project leader will present the options to the management, clearly outlining the cost of their services and value offered.
The management will then select the most appropriate vendor based on the value offered. The process of identifying and selecting the most appropriate vendor is expected to last for two months, from the beginning of May to the end of June. The next phase will be the installation of the system. After making the purchase, the vendor will be expected to install the system that the nurses will use. The installation process can take about two weeks before these vendors can embark on training the staff.
As soon as the system is installed, the vendor will train the nurses, doctors, and other relevant members of the staff on how to use the system to make their work easy. These activities will take two months, from early July to end of August. By October, everything should be ready for the official commencement of the use of the new system to manage data and communicate within the firm. All the stakeholders will have their different roles in ensuring that the new system delivers the desired value.
Evaluation Methodology
As mentioned in the introduction, the current data management approach and communication among the nurses is time consuming, creating pressure among the nurses in terms of delivering their services to their clients. The current system also makes the process of handing patients from one nurse to the other at the end of the shift ineffective. Once the new system is introduced, the challenges identified should be addressed. The evaluation method should focus on how well the objectives were met when the change was introduced. When the outcomes of the project meet, the set objectives, then the identified problems will be addressed (Berkowitz & McCarthy, 2013).
One method of evaluating the outcome of the project will be to determine the ease with which nurses can record data when observing patients in the wards. The new method must make the process of recording the observation easier and less time consuming. It should eliminate cases where nurses are forced to go back to the wards and observe again because of lost or misplaced paper records. It should also eliminate instances where nurses guess patients’ data, based on previous records because of time constraint (Braunstein, 2013). The workload of individual nurses should be reduced once the system is introduced.
When conducting the evaluation of the new system, it should be determined whether communication between nurses and doctors and among nurses is improved. These are the premises upon which the evaluation will be based.
Conclusion
Data management and communication among the medical staff are critical activities in healthcare institutions. With the emerging technologies, pressure is mounting on healthcare institutions to embrace the emerging technologies as a way of reducing pressure on the medical staff and improving quality of the services offered. This project focused on eliminating paperwork completely at ABC Healthcare Center.
The project seeks to reduce the workload of nurses by improving the efficiency of their work. The project seeks to ensure that when nurses are leaving at the end of their shifts, they leave detailed and relevant information about their patients to ease the work of the incoming nurses and eliminate mistakes that are often related to miscommunication or provision of wrong data about a given patient. It is expected that this project will transform the quality of services at this institution.
References
Berkowitz, L., & McCarthy, C. (2013). Innovation with information technologies in healthcare. London, UK: Springer.
Braunstein, M. L. (2013). Health informatics in the cloud. New York, NY: Springer.
Braunstein, M. L. (2015). Practitioner’s guide to health informatics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons Publishers.
Dua, S., Acharya, U. R., & Dua, P. (2014). Machine learning in healthcare informatics. Berlin, Germany: Springer.
Hoyt, R. E., & Yoshihashi, A. (2014). Health informatics: Practical guide for healthcare and information technology professionals. New York, NY: Cengage.
Maeder, A., & Martin-Sanchez, F. J. (2012). Health Informatics: Building a healthcare future through trusted information; selected papers from the 20th Australian National Health Informatics Conference (HIC 2012). Amsterdam, Netherlands: IOS Press Inc.
Nelson, R., & Staggers, N. (2014). Health informatics: An interprofessional approach. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.
Tavana, M., Ghapanchi, A. H., & Talaei-Khoei, A. (2015). Healthcare informatics and analytics: Emerging issues and trends. New York, NY: Springer.