IT Manager Perspective - Research Paper Example

Chapter 3 Ans a). BIDMC is a teaching Medical Center with care giving facilities too. Amedical centre possesses certain special features which distinguish its IT investment decisions against a community hospital. First and foremost is the requirement to constantly engage in research and development work. Medical Centers usually get grants and funding from bigger institutions, government and research bodies. As a result, they are in a better condition to implement their findings and new technologies in the form of IT investments. (b). The organizations is an early adopter of HIT because from the very beginning, it had been working on clinical computing.

Further, major IT roll-outs took place between 1995-2007 and almost all IT developments like EMR, CPOE and others had been implemented by 2007. This supports its early adoption of HIT (Bohmer et al. 2007). Ans. 2. BIDMC relies heavily on custom-developed application because it feels there are certain shortcomings with vendor developed packages. Such shortcomings arise from trust factor, incompatibility issue with home application and vendor software and most importantly, availability of vendor to anytime upgrade or provide support to the system.

Amidst such challenges, BIDMC considers it better to develop in-house capabilities than depending upon an outside vendor. Seeing the level of expertise and confidence of users in custom-developed applications in-house, this emphasis is not going to diminish or change. In fact, synchronization problems with the vendor and inability to manage the workflows with vendor managed software encourage the use of custom-developed clinical systems at BIDMC. Ans. 3 (a). The OMR constituted separate views for clinicians and patients for security and privacy purposes.

Clinicians could track any information of patients, ranging from visits, test reports, alerts, lab results, follow ups or referring to any other physician. Patients could also see the complete history of their medical record, results, vaccinations, visits, reminders and all. Interesting feature about this application was the use of results tab which automatically triggered an alert if physician had not seen it. (b). The POE system was also developed in dashboard and decision support competencies.

Information regarding the patients, their orders, lab results pending or approved, etc. can be view at the dashboard with the help of symbols designed separately. All the information at POE was automatically transferred to OMR. Special feature was alerts for vaccinations for elderly patients. (c). E-prescribing was attached with decision support capabilities. As a result, drug-drug interactions, side effects, allergies or inconsistencies were instantly alerted by the system. Major inconsistencies could not be done away with by physicians and have to look for other drug options.

Introduction of decision support in test ordering was an interesting feature of this system whereby test details, cost, background references, etc. were provided by the system once a physician tried to order a test for a patient. (d). The ED dashboard provided complete summary of the patients flow at ED. From wait times to transfers, status of orders pending, test results and staff assigned to each patient were displayed at ED dashboard. Interesting feature was division of nursing workloads to nurses handling fewer patients. Ans. 4 (a).

SafeMed provided decision making support on the choice of most cost-effective and secure test ordered by physicians. (b). Framing of questions to analyze the cost effectiveness and safety of tests can be challenging as well as securing authorization numbers for the selected tests. (c). Being a point-of-care alert, the design should be able to provide necessary background details and options available to change the incorrect protocol. Also, the physician should be provided with reading or reference material later on so that similar alerts do not take place again. Ans. 5. Dr. Halamka is very knowledgeable in his field and shares it with others freely.

He provides clear and rich answers to queries and comments posted on his blog. Currently, HIT is tackling with security issues of billing and audit of medical transactions (Halamka 2011). Ans. 6. I would prefer to join Halamka’s IT organization because of the level of expertise and dedication of people there towards developing new IT enabled clinical systems. Halamka’s organization has worked on multifarious projects in different technologies and this will provide an opportunity to learn more than a single or two software producing Vendor Company.

Works Cited Bohmer, Richard, M.J, McFarlan, Warren, F & Milstein, Adler, J. “Information Technology and Clinical Operations at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Harvard Business School. 2007. Halamka, John. D.. “Life as a Healthcare CIO.” Blogspot. 2011