Blog

Future Planning Healing Hands hospital Discussion

3 Goals for Changing the Organization

By adopting technology, Healing Hand hospital can create significant changes for its operations and for customers. Technology can transform patient safety through reduction of patient errors. Patient safety is a good reason for Healing Hands Hospital to initiate organizational changes. Concerning patient safety, technology is one of the best ways to reduce/eradicate many medical errors (Vakola, & Petrou, 2018). For example, medication errors by clinicians as a result of not having enough information about a patient or drug can be eliminated by Electronic Health Records technology (EHR). EHR technology stores complete and adequate information about patients and drugs to help nurses and doctors make effective decisions about treatment plans and prescriptions without errors.

Another goal for Healing Hands Hospital is to facilitate and increase communication between clinicians by leveraging modern technology. In the course of treatment, patients deal with multiple healthcare givers involved in their care. Communication failures between clinicians is one of the factors that create adverse events in hospitals. Healing Hands hospital can use EHR technology to improve communication between clinicians to reduce the occurrence of adverse events. As a way of not bringing harm to patients, Healing Hand Hospital can use technology to reduce adverse events.

By adopting technology, healing Hands hospital derives the advantage of synchronous telemedicine and patient monitoring. Through virtual visits, the facility can impact the community in better ways than it can face-to-face (Shah et al., 2018). Virtual visits help hospital to cut patient wait times thus saving nurses and doctors the much needed time to attend pressing matters. For patients, virtual visits saves both money and time because they do not have to go to the facility physically to get treatment. Gadgets such as electronic reporting systems improve clinical processes for patients and clinicians.

Staffing Needs To Meet The Change Goals.

Staff training and education is critical for initiating changes in organizations. Effecting new changes in an organization require that members of staff especially those affected by the changes must be ready for the changes. One of the most effective ways to get staff ready for changes is through training. The staff of Healing Hands Hospital must be trained on how to effectively use the new EHR technologies introduced at the hospital. Training the employees will also help them to avoid mistakes and errors when using the machines. Adequate knowledge of new systems help employees to be fully prepared and adopt new changes.

Adopting effective hiring strategies is a way of meeting staffing needs. To meet patient safety goals, quality improvement and, improved patient outcomes, it is paramount that healthcare organizations re-evaluate their hiring strategies (Wynen, et al., 2020). To begin with, Healing Hands must start hiring employees that fit well with their new organizational look-considering the new changes. It is prudent that the facility higher highly skilled employees with adequate knowledge in technology. This is critical so that the firm does not spend too much money hiring and then training employees.

Overall Impact of the Change Goals on the Future of Healing Hands Hospital.

            Healing Hands hospital will realize improved patient safety. One of the advantages that the facility stand to gain from adopting the new changes is improved patient safety. Reduced medical errors is one of the factors that will lead to improved patient safety. The adoption of new technology will lead to fewer medication, prescription, and diagnosis errors. Besides, the new changes will lead to less adverse incidences at the hospital leading to little or no patient harm.

Healing Hands hospital will achieve improved communication and collaboration between clinicians leading to better outcomes. Technology such as EHR fosters collaboration between clinicians since patients have to pass through different healthcare professionals. Through these technologies, these professionals can interact and collaborate to make better decisions about patients’ treatment and medications. For example, different clinicians can use data held electronically to make better decisions concerning patient medication and treatment.

The new changes will lead to improved productivity and work-life balance of healthcare workers. To begin with, technology makes work easier for clinicians. For example without patient electronic record technology, a clinician could be digging through mountains of papers to access the records of a single patient which could take hours to take. However, with technology such as EHR, with a simple touch of a button, a clinician has a patient’s record in less than five seconds (Bowens, Frye & Jones, 2018). For the clinicians, this is work made easy and convenient.

The impact here is clinicians have more time on their hands to attend to other patients and to plan their work-life schedule. Another impact of technology is that it helps to reduce nurse/doctor burnout. Some of the duties that could have been performed manually by these professionals can now be handled by technology/machines. The result is that nurses and doctors can save energy and time by avoiding some duties that can be performed by machines. At the end of their shifts, they are less tired which means little or no burnout.

References

• Bowens, F. M., Frye, P. A., & Jones, W. A. (2010). Health information technology: integration of clinical workflow into meaningful use of electronic health records. Perspectives in Health Information Management/AHIMA, American Health Information Management Association, 7(Fall).
• Shah, B., Shah, N., Shakhla, S., & Sawant, V. (2018, December). Remodeling the healthcare industry by employing blockchain technology. In 2018 international conference on circuits and systems in digital enterprise technology (ICCSDET) (pp. 1-5). IEEE. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICCSDET.2018.8821113
• Vakola, M., & Petrou, P. (2018). An overview of the impact of organizational change on individuals and organizations: An introductory note. Organizational Change, 1-11.
• Wynen, J., Boon, J., Kleizen, B., & Verhoest, K. (2020). How multiple organizational changes shape managerial support for innovative work behavior: Evidence from the Australian Public Service. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 40(3), 491-515. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0734371X18824388