System Development Life Cycle Assignment: Week 4 – NURS 8200

System Development Life Cycle Assignment

“He who fails to plan, plans to fail.” — Proverb

Whether you are building a house, buying a new software program, or going on vacation, a carefully considered plan may encourage a positive outcome. In health care, planning for the adoption and integration of health information technology systems requires research, analysis, communication, and collaboration. During the planning phase, those leading a health information technology system project must evaluate potential problems related to patient needs, staff workloads, and costs, among other things. Planning frameworks can assist leaders with this task.

This week, you examine a popular planning framework—the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC)—as you begin your Major Assessment for this course: investigating a health information technology system or health information application. You also explore how leaders facilitate the implementation of HIT projects and consider strategies for garnering support from key stakeholders and decision makers.

Learning Objectives: System Development Life Cycle Assignment: Week 4 – NURS 8200

Students will:

• Analyze how HIT projects are identified and moved forward within an organization
• Evaluate the impact of leaders and key decision makers on implementing HIT projects within an organization
• Critically analyze the development and implementation of a health information technology system or application /li>

Photo Credit: [JGI/Tom Gril]/[Blend Images]/Getty Images

Learning Resources- System Development Life Cycle Assignment

Note: To access this week’s required library resources, please click on the link to the Course Readings List, found in the Course Materials section of your Syllabus.

Required Readings – System Development Life Cycle Assignment: Week 4 – NURS 8200

Course Text: Ball, M. J., Douglas, J. V., Hinton Walker, P., DuLong, D., Gugerty, B., Hannah, K. J., . . . Troseth, M. R. (Eds.) (2011). Nursing informatics: Where technology and caring meet (4th ed.). London, England: Springer-Verlag.

• Chapter 17, “Disruptive Innovation: Point of Care”. This chapter uses real-world integration examples to illustrate the visions and challenges that characterize Smart Point of Care systems. Course Text: American Nurses Association. (2008). Nursing informatics: Scope and standards of practice. Silver Spring, MD: Author.

• “Standards of Nursing Informatics Practice” (pp. 67-79). This excerpt presents the specific measurement criteria found within each nursing informatics standard.

Madsen, M. (2010). Knowledge and information modeling. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 151, 84-103. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases. Within this article, the overall design models of information systems are linked to the metastructures, data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Peleg, M. (2011). The role of modeling in clinical information system development life cycle. Methods of Information in Medicine, 50(1), 7-10. The author of this article discusses the role of conceptual modeling in health information technology systems and how it has been an effective component of system development.

Philip, A., Afolabi, B., Adeniran, O., Oluwatolani, O., & Ishaya, G. (2010). Towards an efficient information systems development process and management: A review of challenges and proposed strategies. Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 3(10), 983-989. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases. This article examines the phases and methodologies found within the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and proposes a framework for establishing the crucial roles that participants must play during the SDLC.

Szydlowski, S., & Smith, C. (2009). Perspectives from nurse leaders and chief information officers on health information technology implementation. Hospital Topics, 87(1), 3-9. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases. Qualitative research is used in this article to examine the trends, goals, outcomes, barriers, and mistakes that hospital leaders may experience when implementing health information technology systems.

Required Media- System Development Life Cycle Assignment

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2011). Transforming nursing and healthcare through technology: Systems analysis. Baltimore, MD: Author.

Note: The approximate length of this media piece is 11 minutes.

The presenters in this week’s media presentation outline the stages involved when implementing a new technology system..

Accessible player –Downloads– Download Video w/CC Download Audio Download Transcript

Optional Resources – System Development Life Cycle Assignment: Week 4 – NURS 8200

Burgess, L., & Sargent, J. (2007). Enhancing user acceptance of mandated mobile health information systems: The ePOC (electronic Point-Of-Care Project) experience. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 129(Pt 2), 1088-1092.

NB: Below is Week 4 Discussion SAMPLE and not Assignment SAMPLE.

NURS 8200 Week 4 Discussion SAMPLE

HIT Projects and Decision Makers

To have more affordable and quality healthcare, disruptive innovations need to take place.  It involves using technologies to become more efficient (Townsend, 2013).  For healthcare systems to implement new health information technology (HIT) the use of the systems development life cycle is used.  The system development life cycle includes five stages, planning, design, implementation, maintenance, and evaluation (Laureate Education, 2011).  The purpose of this discussion is to describe a HIT project in my healthcare system and the impact key decision makers made on implementation of the project.

HIT Project

The healthcare system had five regional cancer centers all using the same electronic health record (EHR).  The system had been implemented in 2005 and had undergone two upgrades to the system.  The maintenance phase in the system development life cycle includes be aware of the new business needs and refining the system to meet those needs (Dennis, Wixom, & Roth, 2012).  The physicians were proficient in CPOE and all orders were entered electronically.  The cancer center had an outpatient clinic, surgery, infusion center, and inpatient settings all using the EHR.  Patients moved between levels of care frequently between levels of care, and the need became apparent that electronic reconciliation of medications needed to be implemented.  In the Institute of Medicine’s Report, To Err is Human, recommendations were made for organizations to use CPOE, barcode medication administration and medication reconciliation to increase patient safety and reduce medication errors (To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, 2000).

The healthcare system had also implemented bar-cod medication administration but had never moved on to medication reconciliation using the EHR.  The project was identified by the physicians within the cancer center.  Patient due to their changes of condition was moving from the outpatient to inpatient units.  The manual reconciliation for a patient at discharge from inpatient status was taking a physician at least two hours and mistakes were being made due to the manual process.  My friend was the director of clinical informatics for the hospital, and the chief hospitalist brought it to his attention.  Together they coordinated a meeting with the chief hospitalists and informatics directors at the other four hospitals to gain consensus.  The group created an enhancement request to take to the governance committee for information systems.  The request was initially denied due to other projects currently prioritized.

Impact of Key Decision Makers

In this situation, the physician and nursing leaders brought the new business need to the information systems (IS) department were willing to support the HIT project, but the IS department felt there was a shortage of resources to implement the medication reconciliation project (Szydlowski & Smith, 2009).  To make a change in an environment it is necessary to have the support of by stakeholders who can influence the project outcome.  It can be done through formal influence such as the executive team, and by the informal influence of key stakeholders who may have influence conferred by their peers (Coplan & Masuda, 2011).  The physicians supported their chief hospitalist and as a part of the medical leadership, committee voted for the implementation of medication reconciliation.

The chief hospitalist, the chief medical officer, and the chief surgeon aligned with the directors of clinical informatics to address the executive team at each hospital.  Statistics had been gathered to show the waste of physician hours to manually reconcile the medications and the potential safety errors.  The chief operating officer at each hospital sits on the IS governance board.  Each hospital executive team agreed and voted that the medication reconciliation module needed to be the top priority for the organization, and trumped other projects.  There was a meeting of the IS governance committee the next month, and the medication reconciliation was prioritized to be the next implementation.  It then took six months to go through the system development life cycle to get to the go-love of the HIT. System Development Life Cycle Assignment: Week 4 – NURS 8200.

Summary

Before implementing the new HIT, the need for the new technology must be recognized.  HIT that is in the maintenance phase should be evaluated to see if there are new business needs and is it meeting those needs (Laureate Education, 2011). The hospitalist recognized they were not using the HIT efficiently when the patients were moving to different levels of care.  And in this instance, it was the influence and perseverance of the key stakeholders, the physicians that impacted the implementation of the medication reconciliation module.

References:

Coplan, S., & Masuda, D. (2011). Change management Project management for healthcare information technology (pp. 193-237). New York, NY: McGraw Hill Companies.

Dennis, A., Wixom, B. H., & Roth, R. M. (2012). Transition to the new system Systems Analysis & Design (5th ed., pp. 471-501). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Laureate Education, I. (Producer). (2011). Transforming nursing and healthcare through technology: Systems analysis.

Szydlowski, S., & Smith, C. (2009). Perspectives From Nurse Leaders and Chief Information Officers on Health Information Technology Implementation. Hospital Topics, 87(1), 3-9. doi:10.3200/HTPS.87.1.3-9

To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. (2000). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Townsend, J. C. (2013). Disruptive innovation:  A prescription for better health care. Forbes, 5. Retrieved from Forbes website: http://www.forbes.com/