Mis final paper

Brianna BakerHealth Services AdministrationAngela Wale, Miami Valley Hospital, Director of Nursing, [email protected] am a senior here at Ohio University and I am majoring in Health Services Administration. I chose to interview the Director of Nursing at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio. I chose to interview someone in this job role because this could be a possible career position for me one day. The person I am interviewing is named Angela Wale and I met her this summer when I was her intern. I was able to set up a meeting time with her when I went home for Thanksgiving break. I visited her office to do this interview on November 19th, 2018.Research and Description of EPICAt Miami Valley Hospital, the information system they use is Epic. Epic is a privately owned software company, who implements its systems within healthcare organizations all across the United States. The applications of Epic support functions related to patient care, such as registration and scheduling; clinical systems for doctors, nurses, emergency personnel, and other care providers; systems for lab technologists, pharmacists, and radiologists; and billing systems for insurers. Epic software applications come with an electronic health record system which help health care organizations access, organize, store, and share electronic medial records. (Web) Epic also provides guidance for polices and procedures that allow health care organizations to ensure compliance with health plan contracts as well as federal and state regulatory agencies. (LP) Angela informed me they use other systems such as electronic health records, but those fall into the functions of Epic. She explained to me how she personally, and the staff used the EPIC software on a daily basis. She especially focused on how both the patient and staff experience has been improved upon since the implementation. ImpactAngela explained how the Epic software has become a part of her daily work. As the director of nursing, she not only oversees the nursing staff, but she also is responsible for overseeing patient care as well as being accountable for administrative functions such as record keeping and budgeting. Every day at work she has to do what is known as patient rounding. This is where she leaves her office to go to designated surgical floors, and makes sure patients are properly being cared for. She explained to me that the Epic system has done wonders at improving this process. The software makes it much easier for her to pull up patient’s medical charts quickly and immediately be up to date on their information. This allows her to oversee more patients each day and ensure that her nursing staff is doing their job. The Epic system also comes to play when she has to work with the financial aspects of her role. Epic contains billing information for each patient’s insurer, and this saves her a lot of time that she would have used searching for this information. She highlighted one more thing she loved about the Epic software. This is that it allows patients to have more accessible care. Because Premier Health is a medical network involving five different hospitals, this makes it extremely important for patient’s health information to be accessible among all locations. With Epic, no matter which Premier Health facility a patient visits, providers are able to immediately access a patient’s medical history. Training Before the implementation of their Epic software Premier Health had various non-integrated software systems. This increased the risk of potential errors dealing with transferring information between systems. This is the reason Premier Health decided to invest in Epic. Epic would permit for one system to cover all necessary information and would allow for better transferability of medical information. Angela explained that her staff was a bit nervous about the transformation into the Epic software, but they were ready and knew a change needed to be made. Since she and her staff had experience with other software, they felt more comfortable and prepared for the change. To start employee training, consultants were brought into Miami Valley Hospital who were experts on this software. The staff had to attend weekly classes and were provided eLearning courses to review at home. Angela explained the hardest part of the training process was finding a class time that worked with everyone’s schedules. She had to assess how many staff members could be off the schedule at one time without patient care being affected. Once the class time issued was taking care of she explained that the process ran as smoothly as it could have gone. She explained the training was very in-depth and covered a lot of information very quickly, but she knew it was something her staff could handle and they proved her right. They now have implemented seminars and workshops for Epic retention and to ensure everyone stays up to date on the software.Takeaways For My CareerIn hopes of becoming a future health administrator someday, I know I will have to work with a software such as Epic, and if not something similar. Interviewing Angela really provided me with a lot of helpful information on what to expect in an administrative role. I am intrigued with how important information systems are in the health care world. I am excited to one day have personal experience with a system, and be able to ensure that everything is being done to provide a quality work environment. Angela did not give me any other specific information systems to research. Her advice was to be open minded about the idea of information systems within healthcare in general, and be ready to encounter them in my career.Works CitedWeb, Epic User. “Epic.” Epic Community, 2018,www.epic.com/software#PatientEngagement. Accessed 5 December 2018.LP, Epic Management. EpicManagement LP, 2 Nov. 2017,www.epicmanagementlp.com/services/recordsmanagement.aspx. Accessed 5 December 2018.