Information Health System of Vanderbilt Hospital
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Information Health System of Vanderbilt Hospital
The Vanderbilt Hospital is the principal facility for health care at Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt Hospital is a name used collectively to refer to an enormous chain of facilities of health affiliated to this institution of learning. The main hospital is situated at a town called Nashville. Vanderbilt University and other private businesspersons own this facility jointly. The 834-bed facility is accredited fully by the JCAHO. There are approximately 60 satellite clinics around the town of Tennessee and that of Kentucky. The hospital serves a large population of patients in Tennessee and the areas surrounding it. The Vanderbilt Hospital is known for an extremely comprehensive system of healthcare information. In the United States, it has been ranked sixth in maintaining a comprehensive electronic record of patients (Boyer, 2013).
Users of the Information
Health information in Vanderbilt Hospital has various users. Each of the users has varying needs, which means each of them use the health information in a wide variety of ways. Nurses and doctors, at the most fundamental level of provider-patient interactions, use this in the form of patient records as a critical source of data of the client. The utility of such information is not confined to the patient. Authorities can use reviews of such records later to ascertain whether the highest possible levels of care were given to a certain patient. Such confidential enquiries are useful because deaths largely avoidable are easily documented, and any cases of negligence dealt with accordingly, depending on set procedures and guidelines.
The hospital management is another user of health information at the Vanderbilt Hospital. At the health-facility level, the administrators of the hospital need this information in order to access patient profiles, length of stay in their hospital, admission patterns, and discharge rates, proper usage of medical equipment and medications, hospital costs and income, as well as information on worker deployment at different cadres in the hospital. Since the hospital operates in form of a chain, there are several branches as well as clinics distributed all over the city of Tennessee. The overall owners of the hospital, the Vanderbilt University also require accessing this information, for a variety of uses. They need to plan and gauge risk factors for resource allocation. Decision-making is often affected significantly by such information, and as such, the owners have to get access to it to facilitate planning and resource allocation. The information is rarely shared with planning authorities in the public sector because the regulatory framework in Vanderbilt does not have this provision.
Consistent reporting by the branches generates health information at Vanderbilt. All routine activities are reported and recorded in an electronic system. In this way, the activities of the hospital are easily accessible and can be retrieved easily for use by health professionals. Nevertheless, this information is still not sufficient to facilitate decision-making and efficient allocation of resources (Glaser, Lee & Wager, 2013).
The government of the United States is another critical user of health information from Vanderbilt Hospital. Since Vanderbilt is a large facility and attracts quite a large pool of patients, the government uses such information to make strategic decisions with many implications in the health sector. In other words, the large number of health seekers that Vanderbilt attracts can reflect the national health care needs representatively. Vanderbilt holds numerous household surveys and collects routine service statistics. The information thus derived is usually shared with the federal authorities. Once the government has this information, it can supplement with information it gets from other sources and use it for effecting government programs such as a reduction of childhood and maternal mortality.
International bodies like the Red Cross, the United Nations, WHO, and Red Crescent may require using the Vanderbilt health information. Goal-oriented conferences usually take place in the international forums where data from various sources is used to study the patterns of a certain disease as well as how patients respond to treatment. Health care information from major hospital such as Vanderbilt has found important usage in such forums. It is important, however, to note that not all aspects of the health information are shared with each of the parties described previously.
Information Access
The Vanderbilt Hospital mainly runs an electronic system of health information. The staff, including doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, and other hospital workers have been oriented on how to access this system. Depending on the amount of information that each health worker should access, platforms have been created for each cadre in the hospital. For instance, there is a platform where doctors can access patient’s records. Each doctor has been issued with a personalized password and unique username for logging in into user-friendly accounts. In this account, the doctor may key in the details of one patient, after which they will be able to access the information concerning the health of the patient. There exists a similar platform for the nurses attending the patient, as well as for the pharmacists who continuously dispense drugs and give advice to patients on the usage of those drugs.
For the management of the hospital, there is a similar platform. However, this has a lot of information ranging from patients’ records to information on managerial aspects of the institution. Data on medical supplies, equipment, as well as drugs is available on the managerial interface. The various managers possess user accounts, and they have individual usernames and unique passwords with which to access. The rest of the information is usually posted conspicuously on the easily accessible hospital website, but none of the patient’s confidential information can be found here. Mostly, findings from research as well as tenders for medical supplies form the bulk of information the website stores.
Paper medical records also exist. For instance, medical history is often put on paper as the doctor and patient talk for the first time. As the patient gives his or her history, the doctor usually jots down some notes, which later are fed into the closed electronic system. Such information is stored in patient files and can be accessed at will by the relevant parties if there is a need to match with what is in the electronic system. In addition, the information the government authorities need to access is usually handed in paper form.
Information System Used
The principal information system used in Vanderbilt Hospital is the Sorian Clinicals. This information system offers Vanderbilt an efficient way of storing and retrieving health information. Sorian Clinicals provide an information system that is quite revolutionary and one with a workflow-driven format. This system is able to address fully Vanderbilt dynamic nature as well as the enormous pool of patients. Through the system, Vanderbilt hospital is positioned to manage its processes and clinical patient data across its various departments, care settings, and disciplines. This greatly increases the operational efficiency of the facility.
The type of system is quite complex. There is a medication administration system, CPOE, which is an order entry for physicians, as well as the nursing system. To have the systems in place and running efficiently, an ergonomic and adaptable user interface has been put up. Moreover, there exists a workflow engine as well as a technology that is based on the web. The system is extremely user-friendly, and as far as classification is concerned, it is an administrative clinical. It has proven to be secure, and interface with other systems is possible. The vendors of the system have remained committed to updating the system and doing other general works of maintenance. The strengths of this system are based on its ability to giving the hospital staff an efficient platform to organize their work while communicating in a better way and focusing on their professional duties. However, a major weakness of the system is its significant limitation on its ability to track hybrid records of patient as well as medical records that are based on paper work. It was also learned that the Sorian Clinicals could be re-designed in case the hospital changed, to adapt to the new changes. Nonetheless, this would increase the cost of implementing and maintaining the system.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The information system Vanderbilt Hospital uses for its health needs is quite efficient. It has increased the amount of clinical records that can be stored and retrieved whenever needed. Being secure and possessing, an interface capable of linking with other systems makes it very user-friendly. However, it is not able to support hybrid records. The vendors could improve this system significantly if they reconstituted it in a way that holds both electronic and paper-based records.