Systems and Technology: Utilization and Functionality of Data Collecting and Storing Systems

Utilization of Technology for Data Collection and Storage

Task:

Overview: In Milestone One, you evaluated the completeness and accuracy of a completed health record review against standards. Remember that you must imagine yourself as a HIM professional at New England North Hospital where you are to review a medical record (see the HIM 200 Medical Record document, linked in the milestone assignment in Module Five of your course), as well as the Joint Commission (E-dition) Standards. In your final project you will report on findings related to the hospital’s compliance with laws, standards, and regulations in regard to how health record documentation is collected, stored, and eventually reported. For this milestone, you will submit the analysis of the systems and technology of the organization, including the system for collecting data, the benefits of each system, and your recommendations for systems that might fill any gaps.

Prompt: To complete the project, you will utilize the information in the following scenario:

New England North Hospital utilizes different data entry systems. Each of these systems is used to collect and store patient data. The hospital uses manual data entry for all clinical notes and vital signs. When a nurse or clinician enters the health record, he or she has to manually enter the
patient’s medical record number from the patient’s arm band. Workstations on wheels (WOW) are deployed to all clinical locations with wireless communications to the main server, but the workstations need to be charged between uses and sometimes the nurse leaves the WOW plugged in in the hallway, writes down vital signs for an inpatient, and charts the findings later. The healthcare information manager wants to automate some of the systems with barcode readers, automatic data capture, and other tools to help reduce data entry errors.
The system has a data center in a power-conditioned, protected room in the hospital with generators to maintain power. The healthcare information manager is concerned that a large disaster such as a fire, flood, or explosion could destroy the room with its server and all the data. There are several options to consider: keeping a backup in another section of the hospital, keeping a backup in a remote location, or using a cloud server instead of the data center. Of course, a hybrid system using two or more of these options could be used, and each system has its pros and cons.

Clinicians have been asking for internet access at the point of care of their patients to use for patient education or to search for standards of care for unusual cases. At this time, the hospital network is completely separate from the internet to preserve security, but it seems it is time to allow access to the
internet. It is up to the hospital information manager to present a plan to bring the internet into the hospital while maintaining a high level of security. Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
IV. Systems and Technology: In this section, you will examine and report on what technology is being used and how it is being used within the
organization.

A. Describe how the organization utilizes technology for collecting and storing data.
B. Describe the gaps or issues with functionality of the current collection and storage system(s)