ESSAY: Health IT Topic

The HealthIT Topic of Week assignment must be submitted by Sunday 11:59 p.m. (MT) at the end of Week 5. The guidelines are listed below. The guidlines and grading rubric are also located in the course resource section.

Purpose
This assignment is designed to help students

Develop an appreciation for informatics, basic skills and knowledge required in practice settings. Students will select a “hot” or popular topic of particular interest to their practice to discuss. The topic will be selected from the website using the link provided in the course Assignments section.
Course Outcomes
CO 6: Describe health information systems within healthcare setting and the profession of nursing in all practice domains and settings including electronic health records (EHR), their management and patient-care information technology (IT). (PO 3)

CO 7: Explore trends and issues in NI and their impact on nursing practice in all domains, including cultural humility and person-centered care. (PO 1, 3)

Due Date: Sunday 11:59 p.m. MT at the end of Week 5.
Total Points Possible: 175

Requirements
Students will login to FierceEMR and FierceHealthIT using the link provided in the reading assignment module for Week 5 and select a “current/popular” topic of the week that may impact their practice. Students, in a professionally developed paper, will discuss the rationale for choosing the topic, how it will impact practice in a positive or negative manner, citing pros and cons. Include a discussion of how informatics skills and knowledge were used in the process relevance to developing the assignment. In the conclusion, provide recommendations for the future. Submit completed FierceHealthIT Topic paper for Wk. 5 to dropbox by end of Week 5.

ANSWER

Health IT (Electronic Health Records)

Health care informatics continues to be one of the integral aspects of a real hospital setting of whichever kind. The aspect of health informatics is vital on how information concerning patients is acquired, stored, retrieved and used in fostering better collaboration among different patients and also different healthcare providers (Carayon, Kianfar, Li, Xie, Alyousef, & Wooldridge, 2015). More so, it is through healthcare informatics that relevant health care reforms are implemented in any hospital. By use of Health IT, nursing outcomes will be improved due to easy accessibility of data from the healthcare providers. This paper seeks to present the appreciation for informatics in health care. It will involve a selection of a topic that is popular in healthcare and related to IT and also present the rationale for selecting the topic. Additionally, the paper will present the impact the topic has in the nursing practice as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the implementation of the Health IT practice.

How Informatics is Transforming Healthcare

It is not surprising how technology continues to shape healthcare. Its advantages such as reducing errors in care or delivery as well as patient participation through access to information concerning them necessitates an appreciation of informatics in healthcare. This few examples bring out the need to embrace informatics for better outcomes. Relevant informatics skills such as interpersonal skills, knowledge of programming and general ability to communicate effectively formed the basis of deriving the topic of discussion and developing this assignment.

Health IT Topic Selected and the Rationale of Selection

The selected topic for this study is on how to move from managing data of patients from one healthcare organization by use of normal Electronic medical record systems (EMR) to the use of Epic systems that integrate medical records of close to 54% of patients in the United States and close to 3% of patients across the world (Sweeney, 2018). Epic Corporation is a company that provides software to different hospitals in order for them to keep medical records for patients.

Both small and big vendors continue to embrace the use of EHR and this trend seems not to reduce any time soon. However small a hospital is (with a small bed capacity), the use of electronic health record system is close to mandatory (Evans & Ossorio, 2018). The hospital I have worked for 5 years for instance has an 86 bed capacity and uses an electronic health record system. Even though the hospital is small, the medical information is very important to be able to communicate with outside healthcare systems. We intake patients from multiple hospitals and to have a EHR system that is compatible with other hospitals, labs, radiology departments and even other departments within the hospital. Nursing practice is faced by different ethical and legal battles emanating from mishandling of patient data around the globe. Furthermore, few health facilities meet the legal threshold in as far as ensuring that all information concerning the patients is treated with utmost confidence. Even though there already exist different ways of keeping health records electronically, there is need to establish methods that are extremely safe, efficient…