HI 501-Western Heights Hospital (WHH) is an 1125-bed

HI 501-Western Heights Hospital (WHH) is an 1125-bed

Subject: General Questions    / General General Questions
Question
Western Heights Hospital (WHH) is an 1125-bed, 5-hospital academic healthcare system
servicing central and western Massachusetts. WHH is the only designated Level I Trauma Center
for adults and children in the area and is home to New England’s first hospital-based air
ambulance and the region’s only Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Center.
WHH launched a 5-year strategic plan with a fundamental goal of a system-wide move from a
predominately paper environment to an electronic one. Phase I included implementation of an
EHR system consisting of order entry for all laboratory, radiology, and patient care orders.
Additionally, clinical documentation was implemented, including admission assessments and all
nursing flow sheets. The nursing informatics counsel, a 25-member group of nurses representing
all disciplines, developed the clinical content. The clinical content was custom built using both
free text and structured data entry fields within the application.
Three months after go-live, hospital leadership is reporting that it is unable to report on various
state and federally mandated quality measures. These measures track healthcare quality based
onnational standards, are compared to nationally accepted benchmarks, and are used to plan
ways to improve quality. Leadership has communicated that the reports generated by the system
are incomplete and are putting the hospital at financial risk due to lower reimbursement rates.
Clinicians are eager and excited to continue to develop content in the application. However, the
project’s program manager is proposing a stabilization and optimization approach and does not
want to go forward with content development until the issue of reporting has been assessed and
addressed.
Assuming that you are the clinical content manager and lead all reporting efforts, what approach
would you take to address the reporting problem? Create a flowchart outlining the process you
would take from determining the problem to finding a solution. Then, detail these steps in a 2–3
page paper