Reference no: EM133306968

Assignment: For D.W. McMillan Memorial Hospital, a 49-bed community hospital located in Brewton, Alabama, implementing an EHR was not without its hurdles. However, the organization successfully on boarded a new system and is attesting for MU stage 2 during this fiscal year. Following are several key strategies that contributed to the hospital's successful EHR implementation. D.W. McMillan was an early adopter of EHR technology among smaller rural and critical access hospitals, starting implementation in October 2012. The hospital began the journey months before by pulling together a management team, which had previously led a project for installing a bar code medication administration system. The group discussed the need for an EHR, what it would take to get one up and running and whether the organization would be able to make a large-scale implementation work. Making sure that organization leaders were all on the same page was key, because without everyone's full support the process could quickly fall apart. From this group, an IT steering committee was formed and tasked with the job of guiding the organization through the EHR adoption process. Team members included the medical-surgical intensive care nurse manager, director of nursing, CFO, quality assurance manager, lab manager and revenue cycle analyst. To optimize the group's performance, different team members began to specialize in various aspects of the system. For instance, the quality assurance manager became an expert in how to use the technology, particularly in relation to bar-coded medication. The medical-surgical intensive care nurse manager focused on informatics, including creating predefined order groups and seeking ways to use the technology to accomplish organization goals. This strategy enabled the team to effectively use their limited resources to become experts in all parts of the EHR system. In selecting an EHR vendor, the steering committee looked for one that would best meet the needs of physicians and nurses, finally choosing a system that offered easy-to-navigate screens that mirrored paper-based processes. The idea was to make the transition to electronic as seamless as possible for staff. For various workflows, such as pneumonia care, chest pain guidelines and restraint orders, the team examined existing paper forms and attempted to reflect the same approach in the electronic version. This strategy allowed physicians and nurses to recognize the forms faster and more easily learn how to use the program.

Questions:

1. Briefly discuss 3 reasons why this project was implemented by the hospital.

2. Identify and discuss 2 major entities that could have been a resource to the hospital during this entire project.

3. Identify and discuss the most critical phase of an EHR implementation, and support your claim with 3 reasons.

4. According to this project, what could have gone wrong during the implementation? 

5. Explain 3 reasons why the selection of an EHR vendor was important in this project.