Healthcare Information Technology Article Review
Research one article on the future of Healthcare Information Technology that will impact your CCP or you personally. Report out in a two-page paper.
The topic of my CCP is Improving Healthcare Outcomes with the integration of Religions Spirituality and Medicine into the care of hospitalized cancer patients.
You can use the article below. Would tie in this future IT ability with the ability to address patients spiritual needs at home with incorporating faith communities.
Healthcare Information Technology Article Review
The field of healthcare is one that relies more heavily on evidence based approaches dependent on scientific practices to achieve better decision making for quality care. The advent of electronic healthcare records has been critical in improving modes of provision of patient care, and more importantly beneficial to the patients, as it has ensured better knowledge acquisition, accumulation and transfer between stakeholders who work in providing patient care. As an alternative system of record keeping, it has worked to provide a holistic view of the patient’s ailment, and effective in scheduling treatments and as such key in ensuring wholesome care. Quality care is considered a statutory duty for healthcare providers, as well as a priority for most institutions of healthcare.
In most medical homes, serving as the battle fronts in the war against cancer, that primarily ends in disfigurement, intense human suffering an in certain cases death, quality in provisioning healthcare takes a different approach from what may be conventionally witnessed in general hospitals. This is primarily because caregivers, need to formulate a unique relationship with their patients, maintain consistent performance, prioritize and coordinate multiple complex tasks, with the probable reward of reversing the pain, suffering and even death of patients.
The article titled The Future of Health Information Technology in The Patient-Centered Medical Homes by David Bates and Asaf Bitton, looks at various innovation that could be instituted into electronic health record systems to further improve efficiency, quality and safety. It outlines a variety of domains, many of which can be crucial in providing patients with a conducive environment in their battle against chronic disease in medical homes. My CCP is centered on ways of Improving Healthcare Outcomes With The Integration Of Religions Spirituality And Medicine Into The Care Of Hospitalized Cancer Patients. Bates and Bitton (2010) outline three critical domains to be adhered to in any EHR systems, namely (to be addressed, with the potential result for achieving increased patient care):
1. Registries: has the potential benefit of tracking patients health by evaluating workflow efficiency
2. Team care: increases patient-centered, collaborative care through adequate patient referral
3. Care Transition: promotes important information exchange from inpatient to outpatient settings, assisting in followups and visits.
Religion and spirituality, are an important aspect that play a role in dying patients. They are an important aspect that healthcare providers must not overlook in their provision of meaningful care to cancer patients. This is more important in medical homes (especially those primarily hinged on providing patient-centric care), as it facilitates in defining quality of healthcare in these homes (Puchalski, 2001). Some patients may associate religion and their spirituality with quality of life, and in patients with incurable diseases, it plays a significant role in defining how they perceive and respond to their care (Harle, Gruber and Dewar, 2014).
In the road map that Bates and Bitton provides, the aforementioned three domains, could be critical avenues for instituting the patient’s religious values, in improving practitioners and caregivers approach to the patient care. Bates and Bitton (2010) argue that the continued investment in EHRs compels an understanding into both physicians and patient expectation when using the EHRs. Making religion and spirituality, part and parcel of EHRs system effectiveness. Greater understanding on the stakeholders’ needs may allow better implementation of EHRs, ease of use and usefulness, self-efficacy, openness to change, and understanding patient’s personality traits (Emani et al., 2017). Additionally, instituting religious values into the process of care, can be effective in allowing caregivers empathize with their patient collaborate with faith-based entities, and introduce faith-based initiative to medical homes, or shape policies for better care.
Bates and Bitton argue that the EHR systems, and its implementation, while effective still has a lot of steps to cover to be the best. Provision of excellent primary care, to high quality services for patients is a constant battle that policy makers, practitioners as well as caregivers need to focus on improving. EHRs are a major battle ground in achieving these aspects. Bates and Bitton as such argue that improving on the critical domains, such as telehealth, care transitions, registries, team care, among other aspects could be key in unlocking the untapped potential for EHRs. With all this in mind, and the fact that religion and an individual’s spirituality play a role in their sense of well being. Provisioning within these systems an avenue for positive belief, comfort and power gained from religion, meditation and prayer within aspects of the EHRs might be effective in promotion of healing.
References
Bates, D., & Bitton, A. (2010). The Future Of Health Information Technology In The Patient-Centered Medical Home. Health Affairs, 29(4), 614-621. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2010.0007
Emani, S., Ting, D., Healey, M., Lipsitz, S., Karson, A., & Bates, D. (2017). Physician Beliefs about the Meaningful Use of the Electronic Health Record: A Follow-Up Study. Applied Clinical Informatics, 08(04), 1044-1053. https://doi.org/10.4338/aci-2017-05-ra-0079
Harle CA, Gruber LA, Dewar MA. Factors in medical student beliefs about electronic health record use. Perspect Health Inf Manag. 2014 Jan 1;11(Winter):1f. PMID: 24808813; PMCID: PMC3995485.
Puchalski, C. (2001). The Role of Spirituality in Health Care. Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, 14(4), 352-357. https://doi.org/10.1080/08998280.2001.11927788
