Methodology for Implementing an Electronic Record in Saudi Arabia - Research Proposal Example

Methodology for Implementing an Electronic Record System in Saudi Arabia Contents Background and rationale 1 Background 2.Project objectives 4 3.Methodology 4 4.Eligibility for data analysis 5 5.Project design and procedures 6 5.1 Project design 6 5.2 Project Procedures 6 6.Statistical analysis 6 7.Ethical and regulatory consideration 7 References 8 1. Background and rationale 1.1 Background The development of EHR was conceptualized by IT scholars and experts in the late 1960s though they did not have much trust on this system, because they believed that it can be easily manipulated or it can easily loose critical health data. This is because by that time, data backup systems had not been developed and medical practitioners entirely depended on paper work. Due to these facts, its implementation took place more than 10 years later after the conceptualization of the idea (Greenhalgh, 2010). In the Asian nation of Saudi Arabia, EHRs use started about 12 years later after its first implementation, and this is in the mid 1990s, through in small scale or as trials (Hoffaman, 2008). As a result of its importance and its real and perceived benefits, it’s very critical for Saudi Arabia to develop or come up with an EHR plan so as to foster its national health records, which will be critical in easily understanding the health situation in the country. By coming up with a new and highly integrated EHRs, Saudi Arabia will be among the first nations to come up or implement such a system because even many developed nations do not have the system (Beverly, 2010). Despite the little development in this field in Saudi Arabia and many other both developed and developing states, there still remain a lot to be done in Saudi Arabia but good signs are there that stakeholders have started to recognize that the health system’s future relies entirely on the effective and appropriate management of information. Thus, the EHR in this regard is very critical in this development pursuit, and in this case, its implementation in Saudi Arabia (Burt, 2005; Greenhalgh, 2010). To ensure that it’s not left behind by other countries which are in the same class and GDP growth with it, Saudi Arabia is doing everything to have a national EHRs system and many scholars and experts in Saudi Arabia have been working on this and other aspects related to EHR. However, there is a challenge that despite the increased primary care usage of clinical based computing in several world countries, the use of EHR remains low in many world countries and this is a challenge to Saudi Arabia because it’s difficult to get model systems of EHRs due to low implementation of the system (Edsall, 2008). Even though the use of EHR is still higher in the countries which have the system, exchange and sharing of the EHRs between the healthcare providers and organizations is still very low. With all these in mind, there is need for implementation of EHR in Saudi Arabia. 1. 2 Rationale and potential significance There have been a number of reviews on documents released that aim to talk about an approach to e-health implementation and adoption in Saudi Arabia. In most recent times, the National E-Health strategy that was brought forward by the government, and various other reports and publications gave good information concerning e-health systems in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Arabian government has for sometime tried to use the EHR and have moved by encouraging the use of the National E-Health strategy (Field, 2005). The already adopted strategies only highlight a number of strategic priorities and initiatives that involve national infrastructure and the adoption support that is required for future electronic health records. Additionally, the rising trend in the multi-disciplinary, multi-specialty patient based care in the early years in Saudi Arabia has led to the share of patient information related to health in soft copy form and this is among various health care organizations, in particular between GPs and hospitals. In the implementation of the system, what Saudi Arabia Health experts and concerned parties need to do is to start with implementation of small components of the system such as codes and the registry, then slowly integrate other complex components of the system. They should implement the system gradually, testing each stage of the process of implementation to ensure that in the end, they come up with a very efficient system capable of providing good service to the Saudi Arabian Health system. During the implementation of the system, they should be making upgrades to the system every time they see or have an opportunity to do so. Successful implementation of the EHR would be beneficial in the following ways: Benefits to Physicians Physician orders need to be placed electronically. Thus this system will be important in avoiding wrong interpretations of handwritten orders (Van, 2010). This will ensure that physicians will have total control over the ordering process and hence benefitting from the real time information concerning drugs-drug, drug-food or allergy that will improve the quality of healthcare. The e-health will be critical in the reduction of the time of locating and reading patient charts. Benefits to ancillary departments The implementation of EHR will be important to the pharmacy, laboratory, radiology, nursing and others in the hospitality industry. The resources in the ancillary departments will be free and this include the administrative duties and this will mean that such people will have more time in carrying out other care tasks and work on improving regulatory compliance measures. Additionally, after this study, pharmacists will not waste much time in manual entering of orders and thus spend more time in the clinical care value (Gable, 1993). A lot of time is wasted on phone calls to physicians in enquiring and verification of orders and this will reduce considerably. Benefits to patients The implementation of this system will be important in the process of safety improvement. This is because through EHR there will not be the occurrence of the medication error that come as a result of the handwritten orders. This system will enhance “interdisciplinary” communication that is geared towards the patient health (Hair, 1998). Benefits to management Through this e-health program, there will be instant movement of information in the hospitals, hence in the process lower the time of delivery of medics, obtaining and processing of laboratory work, scheduling and completion of radiology exams. However, standardizing of the healthcare process is another important task in this study since from the implementation of the e-health system, the national level, health data and information centers will be in one since they will be combined. 2. Project objectives This study’s aim is to spell out the importance of the implementation of the EHR system in the healthcare sector in this Asian country which is under study in this case, and this county is none other than Saudi Arabia. Other objectives of this study include: To determine willingness of the Saudi Arabian government in the implementation of the EHR To determine the perception of the healthcare professionals about the benefits and problems of the EHR implementation in the nation of Saudi Arabia. 3. Methodology 3.1 Collection of Data A questionnaire based study which is cross-sectional will be used in this study; the study respondents will be the IT managers in the various government hospitals in Saudi Arabia. Since these people are computer literate, this study will definitely modify the survey to be web-based. The questionnaires will be conducted in stages; software for web survey will be used in preparing the questionnaires. In stage one, there will be a number of questionnaires that will be applied and this will be incorporated and will help in producing a survey draft. The survey which will be web based will be pilot based test on the committee officials and the information got from them will be used in improving the already drafted questionnaire (Alyemen, 2011). Revisions and refinement will be made until the final draft will be ready. Therefore, the last version of the draft will be based on the questionnaires already drafted and the information from the committee officials of the project. The questionnaires will constitute a number of EHR topics. There will be background questions regarding the size, location, type and year the hospital was started. There will also be questions about the various functions of order entry, decision support, chart review, the EHR, communication and documentation (Van, 2010). Additionally, questions regarding the EHR security system will be raised. There will be an overall question on additional tools that are available in the system of EHR. There will be open ended questions about the challenges faced by IT heads in the process of deploying the EHRs in the hospitals. 4. Eligibility for data analysis A research is stated to have a high validity if the given analysis only contains the information which one seeks to study. Eligibility is broken down into three sub-groups that include: construct internal and external eligibility. Construct eligibility can be defined as the process of data analysis (Sitting, 1999). The use of questionnaires will be directed towards the hospital heads and therefore if IT managers do not belong to the hospital, then they will not be able to answer analysis questions. Internal eligibility was achieved through linkage between theory and empirical research. External eligibility was achieved through the application of the domain of study being generalized. Data reliability can be defined as the extent to which the data collection techniques or analysis procedures will yield consistent findings (Jha, 2009). Data was analyzed and interpreted based on theoretical framework and research was related to empirical evidence. The degree of accuracy and eligibility of data greatly depends on the approach and methods employed during data collection. Hence to ensure accuracy and eligibility of data, sufficient time was allocated to respondents. 5. Project design and procedures 5.1 Project design The sample design involved the process of choosing the correct samples from the data collected, and this included the sample size, test units and method of selection of the samples required to give reliable data that can solve the research questions. 5.2 Project Procedures Task Start date Completion date Research proposal March 2013 March 2013 Literature review and extended and deepened March 2013 April 2013 Collecting data April 2013 April 2013 Data analysis April 2013 April 2013 Complete final report April 2013 April 2013 Submission April 2013 April 2013 6. Statistical analysis The research was limited to the exploratory data analysis because it employs various techniques to optimizes insight into data, extract vital variables, uncover underlying issues, detect anomalies and outliers and tests assumptions (Harper, 2003). Quantitative analyses will be conducted using inferential and descriptive statistical tools. The study will employ SPSS software version 18.0 in data analysis. The descriptive statistics will be used to depict central tendency, categorize and further analyze the data included standard deviation, mean, mode, frequencies and percentages. Mean will be calculated because it provides the average of values to represent the distribution with continuous or discrete variables which are not used wholly (Laerum, 2001). On the other hand, standard deviation measures average variability in the scores. Therefore descriptive analysis was used in describing dispersion of obtained data (i.e. degree of similarity between responses) and percentage distribution provided to show nominal variable variability (Jha, 2009). 7. Ethical and regulatory consideration There are ethical things that need to be taken care of to ensure that there is the right of complete security when gathering information. Marketing Research Society (Mole, 2006) recommends that while conducting the research there is need to gain confidence and co-operation of respondents when conduction research. Thus the attributes of honesty, objectivity, and privacy are very important values in administering questionnaires or conducting interviews. Thus all the participants must be guaranteed that the research follows the acceptable Code of Conduct, including anonymity of information given. Therefore this research will incorporate ethical consideration when collecting information from the IT hospital heads to support the topic under investigation. This study will consider the following guidelines, as they are stipulated in Sitting (2011): i. There is need to maintain the privacy of respondents in all circumstances, apart from the time when their consent is acquired. ii. The respondents should be assured and need to know that the information they give is only used for the research purposes. iii. All participants should be advised to complete their own questionnaire with maximum accuracy. References Alyemeni, M. (2011). Five Year Program to Transform Healthcare Delivery in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh: Saudi Arabia Ministry of Health. Beverly, A. (2010). “Paper vs. Electronic Medical Records.” eHow.com. Burt, C. (2005). Which Physicians and Practices Are Using Electronic Medical Records? Health Affairs, 24 (5), 1334–43. Edsall, R. (2008). User Satisfaction with EHRs: Report of a Survey of 422 Family Physicians. Family Practice Management, 15 (2), 25–32. Field, A. (2005). Discovering Statistics Using SPSS. London: Sage Publication. Gable, R. (1993). Instrument development in the affective domain. Boston/Dordrecht/London: Klewer Academic Publishers. Greenhalgh, T. (2010). Adoption and Non-adoption of a Shared Electronic Summary Care Record in Saudi Arabia: A Mixed-Method Case Study. Saudi Arabia Medical Journal, 340, c3111. Hair, C. (1998). Multivariate Data Analysis with Readings. New York: Macmillan Publishing. Harper, l. (2003). Research Methodology: a step by step guide for beginners. London: Sage publication. Hoffman, S. (2008). Finding a Cure: The Case for Regulation and Oversight of Electronic Health Record Systems. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 22 (1), 107. Jha, A. (2009). Use of Electronic Health Records in U.S. Hospitals. New Saudi Arabian Journal of Medicine, 360, 1628–38. Laerum, H. (2001). Doctors’ Use of Electronic Medical Records Systems in Hospitals: Cross Sectional Survey. Saudi Arabia Medical Journal, 323, 1344–48. Mole, D. (2006). Electronic Patient Data Confidentiality Practices among Surgical Trainees: Questionnaire Study. Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 88 (6), 550– 53. Sittig, D. (2011). Advantages of Computer-based Medical Records. London: Sage. Sittig, D. (1999). Advantages of Computer-based Medical Records. The Informatics Review. Van, F. (2010). How New Technologies Will Affect Health Care Managers. 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