EHR Implementation in a Family Practice Clinic - Essay Example

Manual management of hospital data is coupled with a lot of challenges making it difficult to retrieve and manipulate data to generate useful analyses for future medical developments. Family clinics have a lot of patients, and effective data collection and storage are necessary in determining various aspects of treatment such as genetic diseases (Schwalbe & Furlong, 2013). Electronic health records technology helps family clinics improve their administrative functions and clinical procedures.

EHR gives family clinics an opportunity to enhance their record management procedures and general treatment of patients through gathering useful information that can be applied in future health developments. The main users of the system will be nurses charged with the responsibility of collecting, entering and retrieving data after assessing patients. The hospital administration will also use the information to generate useful analyses that will help them determine trends in medical conditions of their patients and determine what types of disease are the most common and how best to tackle them (Schwalbe & Furlong, 2013).

The process for implementing the system will be conducted by a project implementation team established specifically to handle this new EHR system. The project team will be reporting to the management of the family clinic on the progress of the new system (Schwalbe & Furlong, 2013). The project team will mainly be involved in the planning, installation, staff training, and monitoring of the system functionality to ensure it meets the intended objectives. Product Characteristics and Requirements The EHR system has various features that make it one of the best record management systems.

One of the most notable functionalities of the system is the archive responsible for storing patient related data. Once the data is entered in the system, it is stored in the archive where useful information can be retrieved at any time in the future. The system also has features to trigger reminders and warnings at specified times relating to treatment of patients. This enables medical practitioners to stick to their schedule in attending to patients (Schwalbe & Furlong, 2013). Another useful feature of the system is digital formatting, which allows users to share the data across a network and share opinions regarding a particular case of treatment.

The track care feature of the system enables nurses to track each patient’s treatment to find out their progress as far as their prescriptions are concerned. The system can be highly customized for each healthcare facility depending on its area of specialization, or even its geographical area, in order to be able to capture specific data of interest. System requirements for the EHR system are as those of most organizational software applications. The system is compatible with most operating systems across the world and can work on most desktop computers and laptops Out-of-Scope Statement The system is only meant for data recording, storing and retrieval procedures.

Other administrative functions such as financial or clinical procedures have not been captured by the system and therefore fall beyond the scope of the EHR system (Schwalbe & Furlong, 2013). The system should be used by highly skilled and trained staff in order to achieve better results. Product User Acceptance Criteria User acceptance criteria (UAT) are aimed at ensuring that the users of the system identify with all