Information System Application Design and Development Health Essay

Information System Application Design and Development: Use of EPIC at Johns Hopkins Hospital
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Information System Application Design and Development: Use of EPIC at Johns Hopkins Hospital
Introduction
Technologic is one of the centric features of organizational operations. Many institutions leverage technological advances to handle information. Healthcare is one of the core areas that has witnessed widespread technological growth and penetration that manages data collection, data analysis, presentation, dissemination, and retrieval. The healthcare providers are racing to get the most efficient, reliable, and trusted health data systems. There are various systems within the market that hospitals or healthcare facilities can procure to manage daily information detailing hospital operations and health service delivery. This paper will focus on the EPIC system utilization at Johns Hopkins Hospital. As Johns Hopkins Medicine experience tremendous growth and expansion, there is a need for a medical record system that allows providers and patient’s seamless interactivity in health information exchange and usage to improve the overall care. Johns Hospital prefers the choice of an Electronic Health Record system (EMR) as EPIC, which is a single integrated EMR system that provides a unified patient record framework for the entire hospital.
Brief Overview of the EPIC System
Epic Systems is one of the largest providers of health information technologies in the U.S. It is used primarily and often used by large U.S. hospitals to access, organize, store, and share electronic medical records. EPIC is Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which plays a vital role in patient care across various healthcare settings. Federal and state directives have compelled healthcare systems and providers to adopt electronic health record (EHR) strategies in a meaningful manner. This mandate has led to the emergence of popular EMR choices, including the EPIC system being adopted by a significant number of providers, including Johns Hopkins Hospital, Stanford, and Mayo clinic ( Johnson, 2016: Koppel & Lehmann, 2015).
EPIC is a specialized cloud-based EMR or electronic health record system to provide information-based solutions across diverse areas in healthcare. It has not only to meet the information handling requirements for big hospitals and healthcare facilities, but it also meets the technological needs of across community hospitals, independent practices, home care providers, subspecialties, and multispecialty healthcare settings. EPIC is fitted with specialized EMR/EHR features that can be used to modify the details of the system by adding modules depending on the information need of the given sphere of healthcare practices.
EPIC is a comprehensive tool tailored to gather all the relevant parties, including the hospital providers and patient engagement. The technological-centric features are inherent in the EPIC system that allows patient involvement include the availability of the patient portal, which comes as a native app that functions in IOS and Android operating systems. The patient portal offers seamless opportunities for creating patient interactivity activities through enhanced flexibility, telehealth choices, and virtual health practices, including video healthcare services, as well as medical follow-ups. Epic EHR system is streamlined, providing a powerfully integrated solution. Some hospitals face interoperability challenges. The interoperability problems often force the hospitals to prefer taking an optimized approach. Thus, the EPIC system usually fits such gaps due to its one go-to design and capacity to integrate data with clinical settings.
Besides, EPIC allows for increased interoperability and integration of more parties, including third parties, by incorporating third-party software and applications.
EPIC, as one of the largest vendors, dominates both large and medium healthcare, markets and it is continuing with its growth by increased incorporation of smaller health institutions and ambulatory practices (Koppel, & Lehmann, 2015). EPIC gains tremendous clients due to its capacity to provide comprehensive needs. EPIC gathers for all relevant patients in hospitals, including nurses, physicians, electronic staff, and other relevant healthcare providers who engage either directly or indirectly in delivering services to patients. EPIC rides on the single configuration feature to convincing healthcare providers to adopt a single product at a time. The standardization of its work has aligned well with healthcare needs. The EPIC system often does not require significant investment or recruitment of information health managers and information technology experts because it is the EPIC company that oversees and conducts system updates and upgrades. The continued success of EPIC is partly attributable to incentives that the company provides to its users. This incentive practice places EPIC ahead of its core competitors by enhancing its suitability and the assurance of certifications. The already gained popularity by EPIC ted to attract other providers and retained physicians who have used its system.
Epic Use at Johns Hopkins
I visited Johns Hopkins Hospital to get deep insights into the usability of the EPIC HER system beca7use it is one of the renowned hospitals that has embraced the EPR system as an approach to handling health-related data. I interviewed several users, including nurses, physicians, medical specialists, and health record staff. From my inquiry through the interviews on EMR use at Johns Hopkins, I got in-depth information regarding the use of the EPIC system at the hospital.
In more than two interviews told me that the hospital has entirely adopted the EPIC HER system. EPIC comes in a single, integrated electronic health record system. At Johns Hopkins, EPIC allows scheduling, registration, clinical documentation, charge capture-prescribing, and computerized provider order entry (CPOE). Besides, it provides a seamless and meaningful connection amongst John Hopkins Affiliates and referring healthcare providers. A Johns Hopkins’s client has a single well-integrated electronic medical record that facilities enhance information accessibility, retrieval, and sharing at different stages of service delivery. The EPIC users included Johns Hopkins hospitals, are often reminded to call pharmacy outlets whenever medications and prescriptions have been canceled. However, the outpatient and community pharmacies which belong to John Hopkins Hospital often failed to get automatic notification regarding canceled prescriptions and medications. This system's fault may lead to safety issues due to the lack of clear communications and directions regarding medicines, e.g., canceled drugs and medication.
The physicians and other medical specialists informed me that the EPIC system presents an immense opportunity to share and access information and interact with patients. Johns Hopkins Medicine created a module on EPIC called “open notes,” which allows clinicians to share health information with their patients through online e-portal. The patient enjoys enhanced flexibility to access and read their health information through notes in MyChart, which is secured and confidentially engraved in patient’s portal system. Johns Hopkins Hospital, as an institution, has implemented a national wide adoption of an EPIC system that allows providers to chart and follow patients throughout the hospital’s network in various areas where they can receive care. However, the departments of gynecology and obstetrics, theatres and operative units, pediatric units, adolescent care, inpatient units, and emergency departments have not yet adopted the open notes,” and Mychart stems through the EPIC system. The areas which have not fully incorporated the patient portals results from the needs of such department and other downsides that can impede such implementations.
I asked my interviews the reasons underpinning their preferred use of the EPIC system. The interviewees cited key strengths that explain their immense use and increased use by other hospitals and Johns Hopkins network of healthcare affiliates, referring physicians, and community.
Critical Reasons for Developing and Adopting EPIC at Johns Hopkins
A number informs variables informed of the adoption and implementation of the EPIC system at Johns Hopkins Hospital. There has support from the federal authorities regarding the adoption of EMR systems due to its associated benefits in delivering healthcare services. This process was marked by the federal incentive program that has led to the adoption of EMR stems by more than 90 percent in inpatient and outpatient settings in the U.S (Bates & Samal, 2018). Johns Hopkins Hospital required a system that gathers for needs in the provision of healthcare services. Such needs included easy usability, enhanced interoperability, patient engagement, efficient referral system features, and secured patient confidentiality. These are some of the issues highlighted by the hospital staff whom I interviewed.
Before acquiring this EPIC system, the hospital did an assessment need by engaging all relevant stakeholders. An Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on health information technology (IT) and patient safety in 2011 highlighted the need to build health-IT that is safer (Sittig, Belmont & Singh, 2018). The authors noted that such an IT-related endeavor would promote safety if it is taken as a shared responsibility amongst stakeholders, including vendors, care providers, healthcare organizations, health IT departments, and public and private agencies (Sittig, Belmont, & Singh, 2018). The use of EHRs involves all these stakeholders, though they might have conflicting priorities and requirements. The hospital management brought vital leadership in all the processes that led to the procurement of the EPIC EMR system.
The Successful adoption of the EMR system results from a deep examination of EHR requirements. In the absence of rigorous EHR requirements evaluation and gathering process, the process may fail to achieve optimal results due to inadequate focus on the critical fundamental features required of any EMR system, including EPIC (Tsou et al.,2017). Depending on hospital goals and aspirations in the context of patient care, the hospital can opt for a system that encompasses patients’ portal, scheduling-prescribing, documentation, and referral system to achieve its core goals of offering seamless, efficient, and optimized care. Before sourcing and installing any ERH system, it is essential to develop proper planning and set goals in collaboration with the hospital management, staff, team, departmental heads, and health information leadership team. The goals should be clear, objective, and measurable. The EHR proposal should demonstrate how it will contribute to the hospital goals of having an efficient and well-functioning health information system that permeates its affiliates, partners, and units in a well-organized and coordinated approach. The proposal should outline the fundamental core features in the proposed EMR system that will augment and complement organizational goals in healthcare delivery. The planning that entails clear purpose, clear and measurable objective and goals, and sufficient understanding of EMR systems will ease the selection process and minimize adverse effects of unnecessary costs, impaired delivery of care, and loss of revenue that may be associated with the wrong choice of EMR system.
Health organizations need to understand how technologies like EPIC will be leverage up to achieve and support organizational goals. The software and hardware features of an EMR system should be in tandem with the strategic organizational goals. A wrong choice of EMR system is often associated with inefficiencies, escalating costs, deteriorating patient care practices, loss of patient data, violation of confidentiality rights, and clinicians may also lose morale. Thus, it becomes critical to involve all stakeholders to come up with EMR selection criteria which prescribe essential requirement and desired features of any proposed system whose core features support the organizational strategic goals and specific goals of each unit, department, affiliates, patient referring centers, and physician offices. In gist, a hospital like Johns Hopkins Hospital would define its goals in terms of illustrating what to achieve in the new system, laying out weaknesses in the current EMR system if it is there and relating it how the new proposed system wil...