Patient-Centric Healthcare - Coursework Example

Patient-centric Healthcare al Affiliation Patient-centric Healthcare According to Judy Murphy in the Case Study, patient centric healthcare involves a medical care whereby the individual patient being diagnosed and treated has the largest control over the kind of services he/ she receives from the medical officers attending to him/her (Murphy, 2011). Under such conditions, the patient can decide where and how the medical care is delivered. This is a major drift from the old-time hospital-centric medical model whereby when someone gets unwell all medical activities had to take place in a hospital. Patient-centric healthcare has become of great help to most people since people can choose to receive medical help even outside hospital; for instance for outpatient services. However, patient-centric healthcare may not be supported by all healthcare organizations hence the need for public awareness whereby the public is reminded of the need to decide their healthcare services. The clinical decision support system (CDSS) as explained by Rick Mansour and Martha Thorne in another Case Study is most essential in the patient-centric healthcare (Mansour & Thorne, 2014). This is because it is a strategy that upgrades the quality of services offered to the patient’s right from diagnosis to prescription. The system accomplishes its tasks through collection of data from various hospital departments and also analysing the satisfaction of the patient with the services offered. Therefore the CDSS is very important in ensuring that all patients are attended to in the best way possible and given the best healthcare ever. The CDSS has also helped hospitals to make meaningful conclusions on the various kinds of data it collects. The data can be narrowed down into reports which will be later used to provide the best guidelines of handling specific conditions in the report e.g. a report written about asthma will indicate the successes and failures encountered when handling the condition and the various reactions to treatment by patients. Some countries e.g. the United States have created a forum whereby the data is exchanged through various healthcare centres for better services and also for brainstorming purposes (Wilkerson, Henricks, Castellani, Whitsitt, & Sinard, 2015). However CDSS has a task of collecting only viable and useful data and this involves very sophisticated techniques. The data should be highly filtered and gotten from various sources so that irrelevant data is avoided hence it is a very tedious activity and it also involves high risks. Another negative effect of CDSS can be the operational efficiency of the healthcare. A hospital may be unable to balance between its normal business part of the affair and maintaining the patient-centric healthcare especially for private hospitals. It is assumed that the first reason for setting up the private hospital is for some income generation then patient welfare comes next such that an incident supporting the patient welfare so much such that the business is underrated is avoided. This is because the financial decision support solutions will try to understand whether the healthcare is making loses or providing quality services. As explained by Wilkerson et al in the reference material provided, computerized Physician Order Entry is normally considered the best option when it comes to the stage 2 meaningful use criteria (Wilkerson, Henricks, Castellani, Whitsitt, & Sinard, 2015). This procedure makes sure that the patient receives accurate laboratory results due to its efficiency menu in showing the name and all the details of a specific patient. However, it faces great challenges since both the EHR Coordinator and the regulation for hospitals do not define standards for the test ordering and also so much information to be followed when performing the test order is not disclosed. This inconveniences the clinician officers since they receive so many calls for clarification especially in a situation whereby there is no efficient display of information onto the LIS. Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) are networked together with the EHR so that data can be organized in a systematic manner all the way from the laboratories to the prescription officer. The network between LIS and the EHR has also been found important for identifying the various patients that visit the hospital, making it easier to follow up the progress at each stage. Although the association may be so useful to the patient and the hospital at large, a serious problem may arise when data at a certain level was wrongly recorded. This can nullify very great efforts done by pathologists in the laboratories since their labour will only be fruitful depending on how the laboratory data will be collected, recorded and presented. The LIS-EHR interconnection can also be challenging during sorting of anatomic pathology (AP) and clinical pathology (CP) data. AP and CP are different are parts of a medical laboratory into which samples under investigation must be split. For instance CP may be so essential in examining problems related with specimen examining tools. It becomes tricky to separate the data because they are almost similar with very slight differences. When data in the EHR is wrongly recorded or interpreted, the physician may end up giving very wrong final judgements on the patient hence affecting the patient’s welfare. The issue of sharing data would also be beneficial to the physicians and various health facilities. Since this can’t be accomplished through transferring health records from one place to another in paper form, the EHRs have served a great support. In developed countries e.g. the US, there are upcoming techniques that can enable sharing of data through various EHR. This is done through the personal health records (PHR) such that all medical information about a particular patient is available to any physician at any given point of the earth. This can reduce the costs of having to repeat costly and time consuming tests. In the PHR, patient can indicate their various medical conditions for instance if one is asthmatic or allergic to something, and so on. Another clinical information system is the Medical Logic Module (MLM) which becomes of great help during transfer of data from the EHR to something that can be easily understood by the clinician under charge. It becomes essential during emergency treatment because it removes unnecessary information from the EHR data and presents the clinician with only important data for the specific condition at hand. The EHR, CPOEs and CDSS are the best diagnostic tools for evaluating patient-centric healthcare because they all depend on the final decision given to the patient. The three are also interconnected in such a way that the patient and even family members become involved during the whole process of treatment. Hospitals also use the three tools to analyse their successes and failures during service delivery hence the next lot of patients may enjoy improved services. References Mansour, R., & Thorne, M. (2014). Performance managegent fundamentals: A look at the decisio support. Health Management Technology , 16-18. Murphy, J. (2011). Patient as Center of the Health Care Universe: A Closer look at Patient-Centered Care. Nursing Economics, 29(1), 35-38. Wilkerson, M., Henricks, H. W., Castellani, J. W., Whitsitt, S. M., & Sinard, S. J. (2015). Management of laboratory data and information exchange in the electronic health record. Arch Pathol Lab Med, 139, 319-327. doi:doi:10.5858/arpa.2013-0712-SO Read More