The Impact of Healthcare Informatics on the Organization

1. The Impact of Healthcare Informatics on the Organization Vikas Arya HSCI 740 Monday, March 10, 2014

2. Telecommunications applications: • Technology is helping healthcare professionals work more efficiently. • Care can be provided in real time over great distances. • Physicians can consult with one another around the globe. • Patients can use the Internet or e-mail to learn more about health conditions and educate themselves. • Surveillance systems can enhance emergency response efforts by monitoring for “signals” in communities.

3. Effects of technology on inpatient care: • Technology is driving down demand for inpatient care, (e.g. telemedicine). • Moving away from “centralized hospital services and towards “community based” healthcare services. • Greater need for IT professionals in healthcare. They are adept at using technology to solve health issues.

4. Healthcare Professionals’ response to Informatics Advances. • Clinicians feel that IT is challenging their “authority.” • Would rather use their own judgment in providing the “right treatment.” • Traditional values conflict with the current trend of “evidence-based practice.” • IT systems are needed to effectively support evidence-based practice implementation and to convince healthcare professionals of its value. • Healthcare professionals are being “encouraged” to follow standards set by experts in the field. This includes practicing evidence-based medicine. • Before SW can be written, IT must prove its value to clinicians and change the “culture.”

5. How Healthcare Informatics is changing professional practice. Using the Internet to: • Obtain information on practice guidelines, continuing education, long-distance learning for academic degrees. • Deliver interactive training simultaneously to multiple sites.

6. How Healthcare Informatics is changing professional practice. Time distribution of work: • Increase frequency of interacting among staff nurses, allied professionals and physicians. • Reduce the time for information transmission.

7. How Healthcare Informatics is changing professional practice. POE implementation issues: • Need long-term commitment; usually several years. • During transition, both paper and e-systems exist, duplicating documentation and increasing time commitments. Can frustrate clinical staff. • Many interpersonal barriers exist. Technology cannot solve these. Only faith and shift in philosophy can do that.

8. How Healthcare Informatics is changing professional practice. Acceptance of Healthcare Informatics: • Varied from refusal to requests for additional applications. • Access to hardware and downtime for re-programming as well as on-going training of staff are noted as barriers to successful implementation.

9. How Healthcare Informatics is changing management roles. Support rapid response to change: • Informatics supports localization of decision making by being responsive to changes and needs in specialized service areas.

10. How Healthcare Informatics is changing management roles. Leaders need IS skills: • Administrators need information about trends. • Information Systems need to create faster, condensed, organized, and more accurate feedback that supports decision making without overloading the users with information. • Do not allow previous experiences to bias view of how IT might help to resolve a new challenge. • As IT systems provide more information to managers and clinicians, they will be expected to interpret information and act on their analysis to benefit the organization and its customers.

11. How Healthcare Informatics is changing management roles. Danger of cascade effect: • When implementing major IT project, such as EMR or scheduling system, balance financial, quality and personnel factors and respond to problems quickly. • Otherwise, users may not adapt and respond quickly to changes and that could lead to failure of the project.

12. How Healthcare Informatics is changing management roles. Changing Workgroup Culture: • Managers must encourage persons in the workgroup to make decisions about what information is relevant to improve overall care. • Clinicians must be encouraged to use IT and to move past initial reservations that they feel. They may feel embarrassed because they do not have the technical skills, but this will pass as they become more proficient.

13. How Healthcare Informatics is changing management roles. Short-term vs. Long-term performance measures: • Move away from short-term goals. In this view, employees are costs. • Employees are assets and their long-term achievement approach will provide financial gains to the organization.

14. How Healthcare Informatics is changing management roles. Paradox of Increased Efficiency: • IT systems make administrators and clinicians more efficient. • Now they both are expected to do multitasking, or simultaneous processing of multiple sources of information for multiple issues and customers. • Organizations should provide “checkpoints” for administrators, allowing them to make sure that information is being used effectively.