WTT2 Task 1

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WTT2/ C156
Advanced Information Management and the Application of Technology
Kelly Belcher
Western Governors University

WTT2 Task 1

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In the proposed scenario, a Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) with a Post-Masters Nursing
Informatics Certificate has decided that the 100 bed hospital that she works in would benefit from transitioning from paper charting to using an electronic health record (EHR) system. She has done initial clinical research and has a solid foundation of best-patient-practice reasons that support this change. She has also researched and studied the information on the government’s websites HealthIT.gov, and CMS.gov pertaining to the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act and the Health
Lastly, the group is very reluctant to continue on building their EHR base with McKesson because the PCPs in the area will not be able to access hospital records, and office visit information will not be available to the hospital based staff. Due to the need for increased man hours in servicing McKesson, lack of discrete data sampling, and the poor continuity of care related to PCPs not having access to hospital data and vice versa, the team decides to choose Epic instead.
Epic has the down side of being a system that will require a large initial outlay of funds.
The hospital will have to purchase software, and related hardware. They will have to expand the
IT and biomedical engineering departments to support and maintain the new system and equipment (something that would have been necessary to a smaller degree with McKesson). They will have to address some retrofitting needs related to wiring and computer instillation and lastly training will be a very big issue. Despite the potential down sides, the team comes up with a long list of reasons that EPIC is the right system to choose. To begin with EPIC is all one system. It allows for seamless interdepartmental interfacing. The PCPs in the area already use a version of EPIC and this will allow for easy data exchange and a patient’s information will follow them easily. The