The Plan for Innovation in Patient Care Delivery in Nursing Departments

The Plan for Innovation in Patient Care Delivery in Nursing Departments








 

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The Plan for Innovation in Patient Care Delivery in the Nursing Department

Introduction

Innovation is all about the introduction, application of ideas, and new steps necessary for individual, group or community gain. According to Glasgow, Colbert, Viator, and Cavanagh (2018), health facilities do focus on innovation on most occasions as a fundamental strategy aimed at countering any unprecedented challenges faced as well as reduction of errors increasing efficiency, quality improvement and reduction of costs. Justifiably, because innovation provides an equilibrium between the quality of care and expenses, health care providers do not have any other option but rather invest heavily in the innovation practices. Furthermore, many of the activities come from the need for desired patient outcomes and reduced costs, making the health care system more adorable and effective. Therefore, there must be a well elaborate innovation plan that contains the elements such as assessment, diagnosis, evaluative strategies, and recommendations, as discussed in this essay.

Assessment

A key area that needs innovation in health care is the storage and security of patient and clinical information. Therefore, innovation means abandoning paper-based medical records and adopting the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) approach. EHRs involve developing a checklist for quality care to determine how health care could be improved and reduce medical expenses. Among the features to appear on the checklist include the foundation attributes that ensure innovation will result in continuous practice of the culture for efficiency in nursing departments (Kissam et al., 2019). Secondly, the list contains infrastructural fundamentals in information and technology that support the automation and reliability data and evidence-based approaches to effective care. That also ensures that some features aid in resource utilization to ensure that all the human resources and physical spaces available are utilized to the maximum. Moreover, care delivery is another fundamental feature since it focuses on addressing any problems on integrated care to find out the available care and settings in which it is supported. Finally, the checklist is also supposed to have some reliability and feedback to investigate how well it can safeguard and support innovation, especially in terms of performance, cost considerations and the overall results. Priority will be given to the findings based on cost reduction and improvement of health care (Aaronson et al., 2021). Therefore, through care delivery, innovation will be patient-centered conducted in the right environment and with the best practitioners. The shared decision-making process can also support collaboration among nursing stakeholders, making it easy to achieve the required target services through connected community and clinical approaches.

Diagnosis

The paper-based chart system contains numerous issues that will be countered and reduced by introducing the Electronic Health Record System (EHRS). Among the potential problems of the paper-based approach is its inaccessibility; some staff members have problems locating some records, arranging files and detecting some specific information from the documents. That limits the ability of the nurses to provide health care services promptly and during emergencies, a scenario that ends up leading to poor quality services and over-burden to the clinicians. Furthermore, the limitation of information access also contributes to low productivity because the employees must practice turn-taking. Finally, the security of the documents is always under threat because it is difficult to account for all the people who access the paper information and audit them (Aaronson et al., 2021). That makes the introduction of EHRs important. 

Effecting the use of EHRs focuses on improving the accuracy and completeness of the medical charts since all the stakeholders are regularly updated on any existing gaps in the information available. The electronic system also ensures proper information sharing within the nursing units since it provides an instantaneous and secure data record to the supposed users. In comparison with the paper records, the innovation of EHRs will contribute to the expansion and diversification of patient care in various ways. First, the innovative technique results in secure communication between the nurses and their patients. Consequently, patient information is easily accessible and available instantly, which reduces cases of test duplication, eliminating potential treatment delays and promoting the patient decision-making process. For example, patients can log in and view their health records, information, and trends to get informed.  

Plan

The shift from paper to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) as a multidimensional process constitutes different institutional and technical features like human resources, technical infrastructure and finance. However, the complexity in the procedures involved mostly contributes to a high risk of data loss. That becomes vital to make critical decisions such as selection, maintenance and training of the medical staff. Therefore, the management is supposed to implement some important decisions based on the patient history, the approaches to shift the information and ensuring that the whole process maintains the quality required. Several strategies and procedures that maintain the patient's safety and improve health care quality do exist. The development of data quality programs to promote and monitor the quality of information is one of them. Another key strategy is auditing that promotes the information's accuracy, credibility, and integrity (Li et al., 2018). Apart from that, auditing holds all the staff accountable for all their responsibilities in the electronic approach, especially when there is a shift from paper while considering different errors related to incorrect information entry. Subsequently, another critical aspect of the strategy is training the medical staff in combination with all the resources at disposal like instructions and guides that decrease the risks, uncertainties and later improve the quality of health care. Therefore, upon converting the paper into electronic files, then they can be distorted and destroyed. However, retaining them depends on both the trust and confidence developed by the patients on the converted information.

Furthermore, different procedures are followed when introducing innovation in nursing practice. First, there is problem assessment where the patients are involved in finding out the scope of the issue affecting the nursing units. Then, a proper plan should be formulated by developing a proper project plan that highlights the goals, expenses and determines the process through which innovation will assist in combating the problem. Additionally, planning will also add the involvement of the required persons and develop a task force that is motivated to pull their efforts towards implementing innovation in nursing practice. After that, the developed plan is supposed to undergo the process of implementation. Under this step, determination of the implementation approach is carried out by either outsourcing or buying the technique from somewhere else (Starr et al., 2017). The proceeding step is testing, and it is all about the analysis and evaluation of the innovation and validating its efficiency in ensuring that it promotes the ethics and the role of nursing practice. Furthermore, testing promotes surveying all the nursing professionals and clients to receive feedback about the effectiveness and loopholes within the innovation. Finally, the last process in introducing innovation in nursing departments is post-implementation. During this period, there is alteration and constant assessment of how the innovation can be spread throughout the health care facility and industry as a whole.

Evaluation

After a well-thought plan is put in place, then it becomes vital to measure their overall effectiveness by asking some important questions as highlighted below (Clarke et al., 2017).

  1. What is the impact of Electronic Health Care Records on departmental efficiency?

  2. What is the opinion of the patients, families and other cares on the role of EHR inpatient care?

  3. Is the EHR approach appropriate in the improvement of quality and securing patient information?

Conclusion

Innovation in the health care sector is mainly supposed to ensure that the patient's quality care is improved in diagnostic and treatment interventions while substantially reducing the costs and ensuring effectiveness. In health care facilities, medical records are an area that requires regular innovative practices. Therefore, initiating an inventory of tech in this area involves developing a high-value checklist that determines the mode of high-quality care and decreased medical expenses. In terms of the diagnostic measures, the EHRs can eliminate all the issues associated with the paper-based medical approach that ensures easy accessibility and security to information. The paradigm shift from the paper-based model to electronic has strategies that promote quality and safe patient care. Some of them include the following: development of quality programs, staff training and auditing. In addition, innovation can well be adopted through problem assessment, planning, implementation, training of the health practitioners, and post-implementation procedures.



 

References

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Clarke, J. L., Bourn, S., Skoufalos, A., Beck, E. H., & Castillo, D. J. (2017). An innovative approach to health care delivery for patients with chronic conditions. Population health management, 20(1), 23-30. https://doi.org/10.1089/pop.2016.0076

Glasgow, M. E. S., Colbert, A., Viator, J., & Cavanagh, S. (2018). The nurse‐engineer: a new role to improve nurse technology interface and patient care device innovations. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 50(6), 601-611. https://doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12431

Grol, R., & Wensing, M. (2020). Characteristics of successful innovations. Improving Patient Care: The Implementation of Change in Health Care, 87-102. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119488620.ch5

Kissam, S. M., Beil, H., Cousart, C., Greenwald, L. M., & Lloyd, J. T. (2019). States encouraging value‐based payment: lessons from CMS's State Innovation Models Initiative. The Milbank Quarterly, 97(2), 506-542. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.12380

Li, J., Talari, P., Kelly, A., Latham, B., Dotson, S., Manning, K., ... & Williams, M. V. (2018). Interprofessional Teamwork Innovation Model (ITIM) to promote communication and patient-centered, coordinated care. BMJ quality & safety, 27(9), 700-709. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2017-007369

Starr, S. R., Agrwal, N., Bryan, M. J., Buhrman, Y., Gilbert, J., Huber, J. M., ... & Johnson, C. D. (2017). Science of health care delivery: an innovation in undergraduate medical education to Meet Society's needs. Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality & Outcomes, 1(2), 117-129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocpiqo.2017.07.001