Proposing a Project for the Organization Essay Discussion Paper

In a 4- to 5-page project proposal written to the leadership of your healthcare organization, propose a nursing informatics project for your organization that you advocate to improve patient outcomes or patient-care efficiency. Your project proposal should include the following:

Describe the project you propose.
Identify the stakeholders impacted by this project.
Explain the patient outcome(s) or patient-care efficiencies this project is aimed at improving and explain how this improvement would occur. Be specific and provide examples.
Identify the technologies required to implement this project and explain why.
Identify the project team (by roles) and explain how you would incorporate the nurse informaticists in the project team.
Use APA format and include a title page and reference page.

Nursing Informatics: Proposing a Project for the Organization

Nursing informatics as a specialty is a direct result of the incorporation of technology into healthcare to help reduce human errors. It is all about health information management or HIM and uses as tools both hardware and software in the form of computers and programs (Alotaibi & Federico, 2017; McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017). It was towards the end of the 20^th century that evidence started emerging of the need for technology in healthcare to improve the quality of care given. The trigger was a report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1999 that was christened To Err Is Human (Palatnik, 2016). This report found that within hospitals in the United States, there are between 45,000 and 98,000 preventable patient deaths that were occurring every year due to human errors. Since the release of the IOM report, there were other works and reports that soon affirmed the need for technology to be introduced into healthcare for better quality of care (Hooper, 2016). Proposing a Project for the Organization Essay Discussion Paper  The purpose of this paper is to propose an evidence-based clinical documentation (EBCD) project seeking to upgrade the patient data management system (PDMS) and the computerized provider order entry or CPOE.

Background

Since the release of the 1999 IOM report, a lot has taken place in terms of policy realignment to implement the recommendations that were made. For instance, two important legislative policies have since been passed to facilitate and mandate the incorporation of innovative technologies into healthcare. The Health Information and Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act as well as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA both made it possible to mandate the implementation by healthcare settings all over the US of electronic health record (EHR) systems (Sweeney, 2017). The HITECH specifically had the provision known as the Meaningful Use (MU) program that offered incentives for the healthcare organizations that effectively implemented the EHR systems in their settings.

As HIM became standard and widespread, the need for a special kind of nurse specialist emerged and the nurse informaticist was born. She is responsible for managing all these technological systems and the sensitive patient information therein. They train staff, propose technology projects needed, and manage the technology projects that are being implemented.

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A Description of the Proposed Project

It is a technological fact that all technological systems become obsolete over time as newer inventions are made. The case is no different with the innovative healthcare technological systems. This project seeks to introduce an upgrade to the existing evidence-based clinical documentation (EBCD) methods in the healthcare organization. The two specific system components that are targeted here are the PDMS and the CPOE (Alotaibi & Federico, 2017; McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017). The CPOE is used by the clinicians to prescribe treatment and order investigations for patients. With the emergence of newer illnesses and developments in diagnosis and diagnostics, the CPOE quickly becomes obsolete and inefficient. The PDMS on the other hand enables nursing care notes, vital patient data and parameters, and other nursing interventions to be recorded and stored. In this case, it will need upgrading for the same reasons as those advanced for the CPOE. Proposing a Project for the Organization Essay Discussion Paper

Identification of the Stakeholders Impacted by the Proposed Project

The first group of stakeholders that will be impacted by this proposed project are the end users. These are the nurses, the pharmacists, the physical therapists, the dieticians, and the physicians that have to use the system on a daily basis in the course of their work. With an obsolete system, functionality and efficiency goes down just as will be the motivation to work. Job satisfaction falls in such circumstances and productivity drops. This means that the quality of care offered by such employees goes down significantly. Making the system more efficient and faster will definitely motivate and inspire these employees to deliver better quality care.

Organizational executives are the second group of stakeholders that will be impacted by the project. Any technological project is usually resource-intensive and costly. As per the organizational hierarchy, it is the executives or directors that will have to authorize the use of financial resources for this project. This requires the approval of the budget that will be proposed. Of course, any financial expenditure on a project such as this one will have an impact on the bottom line of the organization.  For this reason, the executives have to be quite sure that the benefits will justify the cost. In any case, they are the custodians of the organization’s resources that must be used carefully and sparingly since all resources are always finite. If the quality of care is improved by this project, the number of patients will also increase and the organization will perform better than before. This is good from a fiscal and revenue standpoint.

The other stakeholders to be impacted by this project are the patients. When the services are more efficient in the healthcare organization, it is the patients that benefit since they spend less time at the hospital. As a matter of fact, they also end up spending less on healthcare due to the improved system efficiency. A good example is that the clinical decision support system (CDSS) works better with an improved CPOE and so unnecessary repeat medications and investigations will not be possible since the clinician will be alerted that the test or medication has already been done/ given.

Explanation of the Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies to be Improved by the Project

A number of patient outcome measures and care efficiencies will be improved by this project. For instance, here will be an improvement in the cost of healthcare as incurred by the patient. This will happen because with improved efficiency, the patient will spend much less time admitted at the facility. This lowers the hospitalization costs. In the same manner, fewer interventions will be needed and fewer or no costly mistakes/ errors will be made. Another outcome measure that will improve will be the rate of unnecessary readmissions caused by ineffective or inefficient interventions just because the systems such as CPOE were inefficient.

Identification of the Technologies Required Implementing the Project

The technologies that will be required for the successful implementation of the project comprise of both hardware components and software programs. The hardware is the computer and other physical systems and networks on which the software programs will run. These must be recent and compatible with the contemporary technologies. For the software, only the most recent and interoperable CPOE and PDMS will be installed and tested. This is because interoperability is an essential feature that all current systems must possess in order to prevent care fragmentation.

The Identification of Project Team Members by Roles and an Explanation of How the Nurse Informaticist is Incorporated in the Project

Just like any other project, this technology project will have a budget and a timeline. It will also have a project manager and a team to implement the project within the timeline and the budget allocated (Sipes, 2016). The project manager in this case will be the nurse informaticist because she is technically knowledgeable and also has a medical background to understand what needs to be done to fulfil clinical needs. There are also other project team members such as the application analyst whose role is to collect and collate all the required information about the project. The other is the software engineer whose role is to ensure that the software system is properly installed and that it is running well on the hardware. Lastly, the quality assurance test engineer is responsible for making sure the system works as it was supposed to work before handing it over to the organization (Mosier et al., 2019; Vant, 2017). These team members will all work under the nurse informaticists.

Conclusion

Nursing informatics has revolutionized healthcare. The nurse informaticists has the role of proposing innovative technologies that are then implemented within organizations. In doing this, she has a team of specialized individuals that help her to accomplish the project in time and within the budget.

References

Alotaibi, Y., & Federico, F. (2017). The impact of health information technology on patient safety. Saudi Medical Journal, 38(12), 1173–1180. https://doi.org/10.15537/smj.2017.12.20631

Hooper, V.D. (2016). The Institute of Medicine report on the future of nursing: Where are we 5 years later? Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing, 31(5), 367-369. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jopan.2016.08.013

McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K.G. (2017). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge, 4^th ed. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Mosier, S., Roberts, D., & Englebright, J. (2019). A systems-level method for developing nursing informatics solutions. The Journal of Nursing Administration (JONA) 49(11), 543-548. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0000000000000815

Palatnik, A. (2016). To err is human. Nursing Critical Care, 11(5), 4. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.CCN.0000490961.44977.8d

Sipes, C. (2016). Project management: Essential skill of nurse informaticists. Nurse Informatics, 252-256. https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-658-3-252

Sweeney, J. (2017). Healthcare informatics. Online Journal of Nursing Informatics (OJNI), 21(1). https://www.himss.org/library/healthcare-informatics

Vant, A. (2017). Four crucial members of an EHR implementation team. EHR In Practice. https://www.ehrinpractice.com/four-crucial-members-of-an-ehr-implementation-team-154.html 

Proposing a Project for the Organization Essay Discussion Paper