Assignment
A community health clinic located in a city of 250,000 provides the bulk of Medicaid and homeless care to the community. The clinic maintains approximately 27,000 active health records and employs 90 staff members. The professional clinical staff includes five family practice physicians, seven physician's assistants, and four clinical nurse practitioners.
The clinic management was recently notified that it is eligible to receive funding to convert its existing computer systems to a new integrated system that includes electronic health records. Until this point, all records have been on paper, and records tracking throughout the clinic has been done manually.
Billing and financial management processes have been maintained on separate systems. Clinic appointments were maintained on another system. The office applications consisted of outdated word processing and spreadsheet software. The database software was not integrated with other software.
The proposal for the new integrated system includes office management applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, database, presentation, email, patient appointment scheduling, computer-based health records, billing, and financial management software. Laboratory specimens are sent out to a reference lab located at the county hospital. The lab has expressed interest in linking its lab results software to the new integrated system via its intranet. The lab manager indicates that the results can be transmitted in a format compatible with any relational database.
The administrative and clinical support employees are fairly stable, with an average personnel turnover rate of eight percent and an average longevity of five years. The physicians on staff have only been with the clinic from six months to three years. The chief executive officer (CEO) has given the director of health information management the task of managing a project to convert existing systems to the new information management system.
Money available for the transition must be spent by the end of the fiscal year; there are 10 months left. The CEO also has indicated that all existing health records need to be scanned and loaded into the new system and expects to see this completed within the next two years.
Task
i. Up to seven representatives from different departments can serve on the multidisciplinary project team. Prepare a list of types of individuals you would want to serve on this project team.
ii. What departmental areas of the healthcare organization should be represented?
iii. What specific skills, knowledge, and expertise should team members possess?
iv. Draft a timeline showing the major phases of the project and the key tasks for each phase.