Assignment:
Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a not-for-profit, standards-developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery, and evaluation of health services.
Search the websites of professional health care informatics organizations, such as the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Useful periodicals include:
Health Data Management
Health Management Technology
Healthcare Informatics
Healthcare IT News
Locate a case study that discusses how a health care organization solved a communication problem with a hardware solution while maintaining existing software.
Prepare a professional report (1,250-1,500 words) as if you are the informatics director of a 300-bed facility and the chief operating officer (COO) has given you the following directives:
Improve communication and coordination between admitting, laboratory, pharmacy, and clinicians to increase throughput; assume that each department has its own system currently in place.
Propose a solution that maintains existing software in each department and is supported by the HL7 initiatives.
In addition, define your focus and select a hardware solution; it may consist of a phased approach or an approach that directs attention only to one of the groups, or it may involve all of the aforementioned departments.
Provide a solution; emphasize interoperability.
Discuss how HL7 will improve communication and coordination between the departments.
Address the challenges of incorporating interoperability mandates from the Office of the National Coordinator.
Consider the challenges of an environment that is best of breed and the desire to move to a standard EHR across a health care enterprise.
Your solution may not implement new EHR software, but must provide a hardware solution to increase throughput.
Be creative with the context and formatting.