Reflect on a Recent Change Management Project or Strategy - Essay Example

Because of MediSys’ partnership with the local hospital, the health care organization requires specialized technology systems not commonly found in most independent care facilities. The change management strategy was to implement an EMR system, the electronic medical record, designed to change the methodology behind how MediSys communicates with the hospital, its patients, and external service providers. The goal was to implement a paperless health clinic and also improve the quality of patient-related information related to database storage and as it relates to patient referrals.

This paper describes the change management project in detail, the systems and its function within the facility, and the barriers that were incurred during its launch and implementation phases. What is EMR? The electronic medical record provides a paperless environment in which clinical information is shared via electronic communications and transactions within an entire health network. It allows for information exchanges between hospitals, employers, patients, network payers, and even ambulatory clinics (Garets & Davis, 2006).

Patient data is recorded in a database that can be easily accessed via various point-of-contact electronic service devices. Another reason for implementing EMR was to ensure less liability for the health care clinic related to errors. The Institute of Medicine offers that there are nearly a million injuries caused to patients and approximately 100,000 deaths each year due to dosing errors or adverse drug effects caused by health care worker neglect (Hook, Pearlstein, Samarth & Cusack, 2008). These errors cost the entire health care system over $2 billion yearly related to dispensing errors, transcribing errors, and medicinal administration.

The change management goal was to remove such liabilities from MediSys and improve its reputation as a quality leader. The EMR provides nurses with pre-printed batch forms each month that provide resident information, their health identification number, special allergy concerns, dietary needs, and all medications previously and currently ordered for the patient (e-infomax.com, 2009). In addition, to improve service time and efficiency/productivity, a digital pen is included that allow the nursing and physician staff to carry the device that contains an infrared camera and digital processer so that they can read digitized words.

At the end of the shift rounds, nurses and physicians simply dock the pen into a processing station and the information from the digital pen is transmitted to the appropriate external and internal units related to health care provision. When a physician or nursing signature is required related to patient care, the electronic pen immediately records this data and can be accessed within seconds. The implementation of the EMR system was to radically change the timeframe between when a signed document is retrieved, thus improving productivity, and also to avoid the lag times in attempting to communicate when nurses or physicians are not readily available in the organization.

The auto-generated reports can then be accessed and printed from a variety of stations set up at the organization and the system immediately identifies and prints a batch report when any document has not been properly signed, thus removing even more errors in processing paperwork. The Change Effort