M8 New Service Paper

You are the Chief Information Officer of a local community hospital. The hospital has an Electronic Health Record system and a number of departmental systems, such as a Laboratory Information System. The hospital’s goals and objectives include increasing the availability of its services in patient’s homes, making results of laboratory tests and other studies available to the physicians on staff, and adding to its selection of services. Hospital leadership has decided to add Sleep Studies as a new service.

Explain how you would configure this service to be consistent with the hospital’s goals and objectives. What IT services would you need? For example, would you need a separate system that connects to the EHR? Would you need telemedicine software to connect to the patient’s home? What additional staffing would be required to implement this service? Specifically, how would this meet the hospital’s goals and objectives?

This paper should be 3-4 pages and follow current APA style guidelines. Support your answers with at least two peer-reviewed or scholarly sources beyond those used in this course.

ANSWER

M8 New Service Paper

Integrating Electronic Healthcare Records

Electronic health records contain patient-level data gathered for and during clinical care. Data stored in the electronic health records include procedure codes, diagnostic billing codes, laboratory test results, vital signs, physician notes and clinical imaging. With the increased rate of hospital visits, these data sets are valuable since they offer information on the disease progression and development and response to treatment and the intervention strategies. The electronic health records system is linked to the assumption that relevant information of general interest should always be easy to access, present and extract from the general information (Pépin, Bailly and Tamisier, 2020). The current mobile society demands the ability to access health records from various places, thus bringing the need to replace the traditional paperwork. Therefore, the electronic healthcare system will improve workflows, greater efficiency, and better care coordination within the hospital.

Hospital Goals

The goals and objectives of the hospital are to raise the accessibility of its services in patients’ homes, make outcomes of laboratory tests and other studies accessible to the healthcare providers, and add a choice of service. The ways through which the hospital can achieve its goals and objective is by integrating an electronic health records system to connect data from all departments and services and introduce sleep study services for home patients. The sleep study, also known as Polysomnography, is a wide-ranging test for diagnosing sleep disorders. The sleep study involves a multi-component test that electronically records and sends data regarding specific physical activities while the patient is asleep (Rundo and Downey III, 2019). The healthcare provider or sleep specialist evaluates the recordings to examine the patient for sleep apnea or any sleep-related disorder. The sleep study can diagnose other sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, REM sleep behaviour disorder, and periodic limb movement disorder. The information collected during the sleep study is used for evaluation and follow up appointments for the healthcare professional to review the results that are the cornerstone for diagnosis.

Configuration

The hospital aims to offer Polysomnography at home and ensure healthcare providers can access the data. The sleep study results will be integrated into the electronic healthcare records system, which will allow the physicians to obtain real-time test results. The ability to access lab sleep study results in time means that the healthcare providers will make the right medical decisions for patient care. The clinicians will be alerted on values above the normal range, thus allowing follow-up care. The sleep study test findings will be sent directly to the EHR to allow easy patient information access and monitoring.

IT Services Needed

Tele-health services will be required since the sleep study will be done from home. Ideally, telehealth entails providing care remotely through smartphones, telephones and portable wireless devices. Telehealth has the potential to deliver convenient and effective care that can boost patient satisfaction and compliance. The widespread utilization of wireless technologies has changed the manner in which patients with sleep disorders are being monitored, diagnosed and cured. Portable monitoring devices will be required to facilitate the collecting of data at a lower cost and short waiting times. Villanueva et al., (2017) stated that it has been reported and observed that portable monitors are effective in comprehensive sleep evaluation and meeting the needs of home patients. Most of these devices have a wireless monitoring capacity, thus being proposed as feasible options for out-of-label sleep disorder diagnosis. The portable monitoring devices will be efficient and compatible with the electronic health records system since they transmit the physiological parameters in real-time. According to Villanueva et al., (2017), the inbuilt sensors on the portable monitoring devices will offer specific, highly sensitive and accurate results compared to the convention PSG.

The portable monitoring devices will be connected to the electronic health records through telemedicine software connecting links to the patient’s home. Integrating the telehealth software with the electronic health record can help monitor and analyze the patient’s condition and increase the availability of the results to the physicians. Integrating the telehealth software and the electronic health records system will ease information flow, reduce errors while updating the patient’s sleep study record and improve the care outcomes. Additionally, this will enable easy access to patient records for more efficient and coordinated care.

Additional Staff

The hospital will require additional staff to implement this service. The team will include a board-certified sleep medicine physician, an additional physician assistant, a behavioral sleep medicine specialist, and a sleep technologist. The physician assistant will assist the board-certified sleep medicine physician offer care to the patients. The behavioral sleep medicine specialist will work with the patient to address the psychological and behavioral factors that affect their sleep. The board-certified sleep medicine physician will cater for the full range of sleep disorders. The sleep technologist will assist in follow up care and evaluation of patients with sleep disorders as well as help with diagnostic tests and analyze the sleep tests.

The hospital’s goals and objectives are to increase the accessibility of its services to patients in their homes, make the laboratory tests available to physicians and add a new service. By integrating the electronic health records with the laboratory tests, the physicians will have easy access to the patient information and test results. The hospital will also achieve its goals by adding the sleep study services and integrating the telemedicine software and portable monitoring devices to boost the availability of their services in patients’ homes.

References

Pépin, J. L., Bailly, S., & Tamisier, R. (2020). Big Data in sleep apnoea: Opportunities and challenges. Respirology, 25(5), 486-494.

Rundo, J. V., & Downey III, R. (2019). Polysomnography. Handbook of clinical neurology, 160, 381-392.

Villanueva, J. A., Suarez, M. C., Garmendia, O., Lugo, V., Ruiz, C., & Montserrat, J. M. (2017). The role of telemedicine and mobile health in the monitoring of sleep-breathing disorders: improving patient outcomes. Smart Homecare Technol Telehealth, 4, 1-11.