You are the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a large health care system. Medicare has mandated that all medical practices seeking Medicare compensation must begin using electronic medical records (EMR). Medicare has incentivized medical practices to place electronic medical records in their offices by giving financial bonuses to medical practices that achieve certain goals. These EMR systems are supposed to allow communication between practitioners and hospitals, so medical information can be rapidly transferred to provide more efficient medical care. The EMR will enable physicians to allow access to the records of their patients by other providers. Eventually these records are supposed to be easily accessed so any physician or hospital will have complete medical information on a patient.
The physician practices in your health care system have been mandated to use the Unified Medical Record System (UMRS). The UMRS was designed by a central committee; all hospital-owned physician practices have been mandated to use the system. As part of the incentives, Medicare will add dollars back to each practice when they meet goals for reaching meaningful use (MU). MU has beendefined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (n.d.) as “using certified electronic health record (EHR) technology to:

Assignment:Chief Information Officer

Assignment:Chief Information Officer

Assignment:Chief Information Officer
•Improve quality, safety, efficiency, and reduce health disparities
•Engage patients and family
•Improve care coordination, and population and public health
•Maintain privacy and security of patient health information.”
It is a step-by-step system requiring “electronic functions to support the care of a certain percentage of patients” (Jha, Burke, DesRoches, Joshi, Kralovec, Campbell, & Buntin, 2011, p. SP118).
One of the hospitals in your system has many primary care and specialty practices; however, the UMRS system was designed primarily for the primary care practices. The committee that developed UMRS did not take into account the needs of the specialty practices, which are significantly different from the primary care practices. This issue has been brought to the forefront by several medical specialists who have stated UMRS is not only cumbersome, but also extremely difficult to use. UMRS also does not give the specialist the information he needs. Specialists noted that after UMRS was implemented, it took them approximately 10 to 15 minutes longer to see each patient. Since an average day for a specialist consists of seeing between 20 and 25 patients, adding 10 to 15 minutes per patient adds 200 to 250 additional minutes, or 3 to 4 hours more each day. And, the physician cannot see the same number of patients each day. In reality, this represents a 30% decrease in productivity because of the amount of time it takes to use UMRS. Now the specialist office schedules constantly run significantly later than they should, and patients become unhappy and impatient. Several of the specialists reported that a number of patients have gotten up and left without being seen. In short, the mandate to use UMRS has impacted the efficiency and productivity of the subspecialists and specialists, further decreasing revenues for the system.
In addition, all of the physicians have complained the UMRS does not communicate well with other electronic medical record systems, or even the hospital’s own patient information systems. There is no real integration of the medical databases as intended, levels of meaningful use are unclear, and in some areas, difficult to achieve, again because the UMRS was tailored to primary care practices’ prescribing patterns. Specialists, particularly surgeons, do not write a large number of prescriptions. Surgeons have been mandated to write electronic prescriptions to reach meaningful use; however, in many cases this is not appropriate for surgical patients.
All of these issues and concerns were reported to the central committee that created UMRS in response to federal mandates and financial incentives. The committee responded it cannot modify the system to make it more friendly to specialists and subspecialists, despite the fact that procedures performed by the subspecialists account for substantial revenues. Revenues are down and the morale of the specialists and subspecialists has plummeted to the point that many are talking about taking early retirement or leaving the system. Still, the committee refuses to fix the problems. Since you are the CIO of the entire health care system, the situation is now in your hands. What will you do?
Case Study Evaluation
Prepare a written report of the case using the following format:
Background Statement: What is going on in this case as it relates to the identified major problem?
What are (only) the key points the reader needs to know in order to understand how you will “solve” the case?
Summarize the scenario in your own words—do not simply regurgitate the case. Briefly describe the organization, setting, situation, who is involved, who decides what, etc. Specifically identify the major problems and secondary issues.
What are the real issues? What are the differences? Can secondary issues become major problems?
Present an analysis of the causes and effects.
Fully explain your reasoning. Declare your role in a sentence or a short paragraph explaining from which role you will address the major problem and whether you are the chief administrator in the case or an outside consultant called in to advise.
Regardless of your choice, you must justify in writing as to why you chose that role. What are the advantages and disadvantages of your selected role? Be specific.
Recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.
Identify the strengths and weaknesses that exist in relation to the major problem. Again, your focus here should be in describing what the organization is capable of doing (and not capable of doing) with respect to addressing the major problem. Thus, the identified strengths and weaknesses should include those at the managerial level of the problem. For example, if you have chosen to address the problem from the departmental perspective and the department is understaffed, that is a weakness worthy of mentioning. Be sure to remember to include any strengths/weaknesses that may be related to diversity issues.
Find out alternatives and recommend a solution.
Describe the two to three alternative solutions you came up with. What feasible strategies would you recommend? What are the pros and cons? State what should be done—why, how, and by whom. Be specific. Evaluate how you would know when you’ve gotten there. There must be measurable goals put in place with the recommendations. Money is easiest to measure; what else can be measured? What evaluation plan would you put in place to assess whether you are reaching your goals?
Attachments:

The-Electroni….docx

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.

 

ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CLASS

Discussion Questions (DQ)

Initial responses to the DQ should address all components of the questions asked, include a minimum of one scholarly source, and be at least 250 words.
Successful responses are substantive (i.e., add something new to the discussion, engage others in the discussion, well-developed idea) and include at least one scholarly source.
One or two sentence responses, simple statements of agreement or “good post,” and responses that are off-topic will not count as substantive. Substantive responses should be at least 150 words.
I encourage you to incorporate the readings from the week (as applicable) into your responses.
Weekly Participation

Your initial responses to the mandatory DQ do not count toward participation and are graded separately.
In addition to the DQ responses, you must post at least one reply to peers (or me) on three separate days, for a total of three replies.
Participation posts do not require a scholarly source/citation (unless you cite someone else’s work).
Part of your weekly participation includes viewing the weekly announcement and attesting to watching it in the comments. These announcements are made to ensure you understand everything that is due during the week.
APA Format and Writing Quality

Familiarize yourself with APA format and practice using it correctly. It is used for most writing assignments for your degree. Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for APA paper templates, citation examples, tips, etc. Points will be deducted for poor use of APA format or absence of APA format (if required).
Cite all sources of information! When in doubt, cite the source. Paraphrasing also requires a citation.
I highly recommend using the APA Publication Manual, 6th edition.
Use of Direct Quotes

I discourage overutilization of direct quotes in DQs and assignments at the Masters’ level and deduct points accordingly.
As Masters’ level students, it is important that you be able to critically analyze and interpret information from journal articles and other resources. Simply restating someone else’s words does not demonstrate an understanding of the content or critical analysis of the content.
It is best to paraphrase content and cite your source.
LopesWrite Policy

For assignments that need to be submitted to LopesWrite, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me.
Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes.
Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own?
Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score.
Late Policy

The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies.
Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances.
If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect.
I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension.
As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading.
Communication

Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me:
Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class.
Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours.