Uses of Information Technology in Company XYZ

Introduction

The purposes of this study is to develop a study that educates how information technology (IT) is used in a health care firm and how it is managed to ensure to provide better patient care. To achieve this, a case study is done on Company XYZ which is a health care hospital in New York. Data is collected by conducting an interview with the operations manager of this institution. The paper ends with a conclusion that reflects on the findings of this study.

Company Profile for Company XYZ

Company XYZ is a healthcare firm that has now globalized its services to serve over 300,000 customers in five different countries whose cities in particular are: San Francisco, Toronto, California, Philadelphia and Surrey .This healthcare firm is a private company that was established in 2007 and its headquarters are located in New York, America. This firm offers quality health care for outpatients, inpatients and primary homecare services as well. This firm is owned and managed by its principle shareholders and operators. Our headquarters in New York acts as the major referral hospital should any of the subsidiary firms become overwhelmed with a critical health problem. The market targeted by this firm is anyone in need of health care services and can be able to reach any of our hospitals and those also who need to be cared for at home. In addition other referrals made by other professionals in the healthcare field.  As a matter of fact, all our hospitals are suitably located in areas that are found to have a high potential of healthcare needs. Our major keys to our firm’s success are: (a) providing a professional health care service (b) reliable in terms of availability and having adequate employees (c) to be efficient and effective while working together with other local healthcare professionals.

Uses of Information Technology (IT) in Company XYZ

Just like any other hospital Company XYZ also experiences pressure of offering quality healthcare at an affordable cost and especially one that is demanded by the government. IT is a very valuable resource in our industry. This is in: enabling health care firms reduce unnecessary administrative costs, providing quality services that are not only error free but more accurate, improving efficiency, and expanding the kind healthcare service provided. For this hospital, a lot of administrative work has been greatly changed. This is in terms of massive reduction of paper work, privacy of medical details ensured and its security guaranteed, potential errors on medical reports reduced while increasing their correctness, data transmission is real time and hence a lot of time is saved and which contributes greatly in customer service and many others. Essentially, IT is the backbone to ensuring that the keys to our firm’s success are sustained.

Adoption of IT in the healthcare industry has proven to support health care providers with the means to administer the best patient care where possible. In order to gain a competitive advantage in this industry using IT, a hospital needs to integrate IT in all its healthcare service operations. This integration will make health practitioners have access to correct and complete medical record of a patient anytime a patient needs to be taken care of. This also includes during an emergency care. Also, this integration enables the hospital staff to coordinate smoothly from reception to discharging a patient. Also, electronic patients data enables a health care provider establish the trend of a patient’s health issue and diagnose the problem earlier before it worseness. With such abilities, in addition to privacy and security of patients’ records easily enables a firm gain a competitive advantage in this industry. This is true because these abilities are the ones that have enabled all our firms to secure a good market share and whose size is continually increasing.

The types of technologies used in all our hospitals are classified as follows: Electrical medical records support (EMRs), laboratory information system (LIS) computerized provider order entry (CPOE), clinical decision support (CDS), electronic prescribing, computerized disease registries, tele-health, computerized medication administration records (EMAR) and customer health IT applications. These technological applications are all certified by the Federal Government. The vendors of these machines include: Meditech, Healthland, Healthcare Management Systems and Self-developed.

As earlier mentioned, the effects of technological applications are very valuable in improving patient care. In addition to those earlier stated, others are: (a) health providers easily participate in decision making and in the process, a lot of time is saved. Also, the organizational structure of the firm has been influenced by the introduction of a computerized health care environment. That is, all departments from reception to pharmaceuticals have all multiplied their staffs at each point so as to serve more patients or customers within the shortest time possible with the help of a system of shared information. In these processes, anyone can attend to a patient according to their job specifications.

With the use of IT, the hospital has managed to structure an approach that responds to any unplanned incidents especially those that threaten infrastructures that support technological applications in the hospital like networks, software and hardware as well as people. These infrastructures are those that enable the firm conduct its business each day as well as protecting these technological applications. The main objective of the recovery plan is to ensure that these infrastructures recover and resume back to their normal operations. The approach developed is one that initially identifies problems arising in these infrastructures, making a priority in resolving them in good time and restarting or reconfiguring them for normal resumption. In this process, vendor details are properly kept for ease of retrieval, an IT department that is highly skilled in maintaining these infrastructures are available anytime. Another approach in this is to establish which infrastructures are critical for the smooth running of the hospital and whose maintenance should be often to ensure that the firm remains competitive in the market and financially strong. For this reason, our IT department is organized according to how the management and maintenance of each type of infrastructure employed in the hospital demands for its effective and efficient operation.  The firm has its own IT staff that is well trained and the objective of this department is to minimize risks of disasters. This is achieved by conducting public education on how to handle and use the technological applications, developing codes and zoning them for the purposes of security and privacy, and conducting vulnerability analysis of these equipments. Another objective is to have some form of disaster preparedness which also involves reviewing the plans to respond to disaster incidences. And finally, recovering equipments back to their normal operations should a disaster strike. In this process, the IT department with the help of an outsourced consultancy, a temporary infrastructure is established to ensure normal operations of the hospital are running while attempting to recover the main systems.

Conclusion

The objective of this study was to learn how IT is used in a healthcare institution and how it is used to improve patient care. From the study, it has been understood that for better patient care, a hospital needs to integrate all healthcare services with technological applications. This assists in saving time, reducing administration cost, ensuring privacy and security, and increasing accuracy of medical reports. IT enables healthcare firms to remain successful in the industry but it is achieved by investing heavily on infrastructures and IT consultancy and support that maintain the infrastructures that make the technological applications to work.

References

Ortiz, E. & Clancy, C. M. (2003). Use of Information Technology to Improve the Quality of Health Care in the United States. Health Serv Res, 38(2). Retrieved< http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360897/>.

Warfield, C. (n.d). The Disaster Management Cycle. Retrievedhttp://www.gdrc.org/uem/disasters/1-dm_cycle.html.