Electronic Personal Health Record - Implementation Piece

Implementation

The decision has been made; our proposal for an electronic personal health record

(EPHR) application (ap) has been accepted by the organization. Careful selection, contracting,

planning, and training, are essential to successful implementation. (Esper, Procan, Henderson,

Becker, Avitzur & Hier, 2010) Now the implementation phase will begin. Any change involving

a quality improvement program is a major undertaking. The organizations’ culture will

determine how decisions will get made and work will get done. Success is usually greatest when

there is a willingness to learn and a willingness to adapt to a new process. One promising

approach to change is the behavior change theory. (Schulte, 2007) Our project team can use a

behavior change model to help pave the road to successful implementation of the EPHR. As

illustrated in the Appendix Table 1, these eight steps to organization behavior change will be

used for our implementation plan of the EPHR.

.Implementation Phase One: Cost Analysis

The first phase of our implementation plan will look at cost analysis. The organizations

complete budget needs to be reviewed.. First step is to evaluate the total cost of the EPHR and

distribute that cost to the required activities for implementation while not forgetting to include

such hidden costs as the cost of hired trainers, publishing of training materials, licensing fees,

and salaries of staff members training instead of working. (Federcowicz, Grossman, Hayes, &

Riggs, 2010) The Appendix Table 2 illustrates the organizational activities that need to be

considered in the cost analysis phase. Each organizational activity must be represented in order

to facilitate the complete accept...

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... (2009). Personal and electronic health records: sharing nutrition information across the health care community. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 109(12), 1988-1991.

Schulte, S. K. (2007). Avoiding cultural shock: using behavior change theory to implement quality improvement programs. Journal of AHIMA, 78(4), 52-56.

U.S. Department of Health, & Human Services. (2010). Conversational information technology (IT) for better, safer pediatric primary care. In IT standards committee (Ed.), Project activities (Grant number R18HS017248). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

White House Executive order. (2004). Incentives for the use of health information technology and establishing the position of the National Health Information Technology Coordinator (Office of the Cheif Information officer). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.