Athenahealth Electronic Health Record System: Acquisition and Implementation
HEALTH INFORMATION SYSTEMS ACQUISITION AND IMPLEMENTATION
Case Assignment
As the Health IT Director at a Hospital (400-bed inpatient facility), you are responsible for all health information technology upgrades and maintenance. Trident Hospital has recently decided to purchase a new electronic health record (EHR) system. Trident Hospital’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) has requested that you provide a detailed report of what to expect from the point of acquisition through implementation.
This report should be between 7 – 10 pages (excluding title page and reference page) and outline the following:
Which EHR product you are recommending and why
Discuss any features that you feel are important, such as clinical decision support systems (CDSS), computerized provider order entry (CPOE), patient portal, etc.
Acquisition (what are the steps and what to expect)
Implementation (what are the steps and what to expect)
Standards (what types of standards should be implemented)
Policies (what are some of the important policies that should be implemented?)
In addition, you need to discuss the benefits of this particular EHR and any potential barriers. Keep in mind that this should be a technical paper that discusses the aforementioned areas.
Assignment Expectations
Provide a 7- to 10-page technical paper (excluding title and reference pages) that discusses the particular EHR you have selected; acquisition; implementation; standards; and policies. You also need to discuss the benefits and barriers of the EHR implementation.
Provide an introduction and conclusion paragraph.
Your references and citations should be consistent with a particular formatting style such as APA.
Provide references from at least 3 scholarly articles (peer-reviewed). Do not include information from non-scholarly materials such as wikis, encyclopedias, or www(dot)freearticles(dot)com (or similar websites). Use this link for additional information on how to recognize peer-reviewed journals.
For additional information on reliability of sources, review the following source:
Georgetown University Library. (n.d.). Evaluating internet resources.
Your response should incorporate the outcomes of the module with the requirements of this assignment and will be graded according to the rubric.
Athenahealth Electronic Health Record System
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Athenahealth Electronic Health Record System
One example of an EHR is Athenahealth. It has several embedded features such as clinical decision support systems (CDSS) (Kruse et al., 2017). It is used by healthcare organizations to elevate the level of patient care by enabling care coordination among healthcare professionals. As they utilize EHRs, healthcare professionals have an obligation to diligently follow all guidelines and standards that promote the effective use of EHRs. For example, they should follow privacy standards and observe data integrity when dealing with patient data (Kruse et al., 2017). There are several barriers that can be encountered when using EHRs, such as Athenahealth. These are system flaws, ineffective communication, poor training, and staff resistance. However, healthcare organizations can create health policies that support and encourage the implementation process. These include training and communication policies. The paper discusses the steps of acquiring and implementing Athenahealth EHR at ____ Hospital while analyzing the standards, policies, benefits, and barriers and their solutions associated with the system.
Athenahealth EHR System and Benefits
____Hospital should acquire and implement the Athenahealth to cater to its four hundred-bed inpatient facility since it suits hospitals of all sizes. Athenahealth is a cloud-based EHR that collects and distributes data in health systems in near real-time. It uses a single cloud network to organize a hospital’s care coordination, electronic health records, and patient medical bills, enhancing patient-health provider engagement (Apathy et al., 2021). Furthermore, Athenahealth has usability benefits since it allows ease of getting relevant medical information, entering details, reading the information, getting useful alerts, presenting substantial information on the screen, and workflow alignment (Hendrix et al., 2023). In addition, Athenahealth highly satisfies users compared to EHR systems like Cerner since it has efficient EHR-specific aspects, such as functions implementation and user interface, enhancing user experience. Hendrix et al. (2023) explained that Athenahealth EHR enables physicians to have a smooth workplace experience due to higher satisfaction and usability. Moreover, Athenahealth has a significant information exchange level between health professionals to promote better patient care (Apathy et al., 2021). Therefore,