Stage Two to Improve Quality of Care - Essay Example

Assessment of Stage Two to Improve Quality of Care Affiliation Assessment of Stage Two to Improve Quality of Care Assessing meaningful use in stage two to improve the quality of care is one of the cornerstones of improving patient welfare and quality services. It involves several aspects such as electronic record keeping for easy retrieval, quick transmission, recording patient audio message among others. Many illnesses that are managed in hospital need better services in terms of accessing information of the patients. Quality services in this perspective are of importance when meaningful stage two is employed. Through documented studies, it has been shown that most improved institution in terms of quality services has a lot of work ups in the health information system. The stage two is critical for the realization of such notch differences in the quality of care that is given to the patient. Therefore, within the realms meaningful stage two, developing a clear plan for how to manage the data and reuse it when in need is the greatest need is imperative in offering quality care. According to a study done by Honeywell and Rock (2014), it was revealed that the services and quality improvement increases because of a number of reasons. This study was confirmed by another study that was done by Terry (2012) which came to a similar conclusion. The two studies that were done at a different contextual time showed that the benefits of meaningful stage 2 include: the speed of transmission of information is quicker between the patient and the health care team, the retrieval of the information that is stored is also easier making the reworking of records easy, the information is stored accurately, the recording of the information by patient and the clinicians getting back after some time is also easy (Honeywell & Rock 2014; Terry, 2012). Additionally, the services that are offered are of great importance since they reduce the reliance on the keyboard and workstation to work out the roles that are preserved by the patient (Adler-Milstein et al., 2014). Putting the studies of Mitchell and Waldren (2014) into perspective, it is overtly clear that the best part of the health care changes that are aimed at the quality of care all have to do with health information system. The meaningful use in stage two is all about preservation of information and making them useful to the health care team. To improve the health care team, management has to liaise with the record keeping systems to determine the organization’s current position, before planning for the way forward. However, there is still a lot of catching up to do, “In 2013 only 5.8 percent of hospitals met our measure for stage 2 meaningful-use readiness” as stated in Adler-Milstein et al., (2014) report. Mitchell and Waldren (2014) affirms this with their study that the preservation of the data is done accurately if there is no data alteration. In Terry’s (2012) research, it was further revealed that meaningful use stage two, has caused an increase in the speed of transmission from the introduction of new innovation of technologies such as speech recognition to the audio feedback technologies that increase the efficiency of care delivery. With increased efficiency, there will be more services that will be delivered to people. Such services are helpful when a facilty’s capacity increases, these services are useful serving the interests of each patient effectively (Rock, 2014). This is one of the aspects that has reduced delays in service delivery when serving the patients, and hence the long queue cease to be a concern. In the hospital set up, the quicker the patients get medical attention, the better the prognosis hence the increase in quality of health care. The research done by Mitchell and Waldren (2014) is in consistence with this viewpoint, citing that slow service is one of the bottlenecks of health care delivery. Furthermore, with meaningful use at stage two, the spread of nosocomial infection in hospital has greatly reduced due to the improvement brought by the stage two initiatives. There is the record keeping of the patients’ data in audio voice before the clinicians get the feedback (Adler-Milstein et al., 2014). The clinicians get safe feedback of patient information and need and get addressed later. The reduced contact between the clinicians and the patient has reduced the possibility of spreading the diseases from one patient to another or from one clinician to a patient. With such development, the length of stay of patients in hospital reduces hence the quality of care moves a notch higher (Rock, 2014). More importantly, with meaningful use stage two, the workstation will have better space for the clinicians to deal with index patients and not the inpatients. According to the research done by Terry (2012), it indicated that the service that are done through the call and prerecorded information from the patient, it enables the management teams to de-congest the service points. This comes with the advantage to the very sick patients who need their bedside services. Another research that was contrary to the bedside services done by Mitchell and Waldren (2014) had the finding that the meaningful stage two presented a challenge to the physiotherapy services that are self-administered by patients as they work to the point of care. This view was a contradictory need for simplifying the services in the name of quality improvement of services of the hospital. Finally, the only cost that comes with the meaningful stage two is the initial setup cost (Terry, 2012). However, thereafter the cost of running the services is extremely low with some additional advantages. The added advantage is that a huge number of people are accessible for provision of health care services at the same time. According to Mitchell and Waldren (2014) the quality of services that are rendered is paramount of all or any transformation that can be done to better the services. It reduces the materials that are needed, and the manpower that is needed. The risks of patient suffering from delays in services are minimized. This minimizes the complications brought about by delays in attending to patients or miscommunications and hence the advantage to the public health, in general. According to the recommendation by Mitchell and Waldren (2014), there should be concerted effort to ensure that the communication between the hospital staff and the patients is increased. A process that meaningful use stage two accomplishes effectively. Reference Adler-Milstein, J., DesRoches, C. M., Furukawa, M. F., Worzala, C., Charles, D., Kralovec, P., et al. (2014, September). More than half of US hospitals have at least a basic EHR, but stage 2 criteria remain challenging for most. Retrieved February 26, 2015, from Health Affairs: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/early/2014/08/22/hlthaff.2014.0453.full.pdf Mitchel, J., & Waldren, S. (2014, February). Making sense of maningful use stage 2: Second wave or Tsunami? Retrieved February 26, 2015, from Family Practice Management: http://www.aafp.org/fpm/2014/0100/p19.pdf Rock, J. (2014). Overcoming 3 EHR Issues for meaningful use stage 2 with EHR voice overlay. Retrieved February 26, 2015, from VoiceFirst: http://www.voicefirstsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/voicefirst-meaningful-use-stage-2.pdf Terry, N. (2012). Anticipating stage 2: Assesing the development of menaingful use and EMR Deployment. Annals of Health Law 21, (1): 103-118. Read More