strategic IT implementation

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The attached document is not intended as an assignment completion.

Overview
Health care organizations throughout the U.S. are required to adopt electronic health records
systems, or EHR. Merryweather Community Hospital, a 110 bed facility, is no exception. Some of the
recent challenges in EHR implementation include lack of user friendliness, inability to connect to larger
health systems, and slowed productivity of users. Design of data entry screens is important, according
to McNickle (2012). User interfaces that make sense, with menus, functions, and entry tasks where
users expect them to be placed is one way to reduce time spent entering data. Another important
feature of effective hospital EHR systems is to link them to appropriate ancillary services, such as
satellite clinics, pharmacies, and hospital physician/specialist offices.
The initiative proposed by the Merryweather IT department involves Updating and transforming
the current HIT system, which includes HER, file sharing, communications with external organizations,
and decision support systems for health care staff. The initiative proposed has been determined by IT
professionals, the CEO, CFO, and CIO, to be cumbersome and less efficient than desired. In 2012, when
system development began, the Federal requirement of "meaningful use" was loosely interpreted
(Lewis, 2011). For Merryweather Community Hospital (MCH), the ability to store and exchange patient
data was assumed to have the meaningful benefit of streamlining patient care processes. However, this
has not happened as expected. Some of the reasons cited for failure of the EHR system to produce
desired results include lack of user friendly interface and lack of speed. Communications and
information sharing are also said to be time consuming and cumbersome, as files must be converted to
a specific format by staff, depending on the requests of the recipient. The proposed initiative will
address the challenges and issues related to system efficiency.
Proposed Initiative
The proposed initiative will consist of four components, as data collection and survey data from
staff have already been collected. Data was collected from all hospital departments, all healthcare
capacities, ancillary(helping) staff, and external stakeholders, such as physician offices. Hospital
pharmacy staff were asked to consult with outside pharmacies, to determine the best methods of
sending prescriptions electronically. One of the four components will address the issue of automatic
file conversion into the desired format, at the request of the user. Another will determine which outside
vendor applications should be incorporated into the system, ...