Medical organizations should strive to become Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) to provide standard care and improve patient safety. Healthcare organizations become ACOs after fulfilling the standards for delivering integrated care and enhanced standards of care, enhancing patient experience and security. Medical organizations must incorporate quality-improvement tactics and procedures (Lewis et al., 2019). The assessment includes a Quality Improvement (QI) recommendation for Sacred Heart Hospital (SHH) to obtain ACO approval by upgrading its technical facilities and increasing the health organization’s health data systems.

It is necessary to add quality measures that health organizations can analyze and examine to understand the patient’s standard of treatment. Health Information Technology (HIT) enhances the standard of therapy in SHH by improving coordinated care and enabling collaboration among multidisciplinary groups. Incorporating appropriate communication tools into medical facilities allows practitioners to quickly exchange patient medical data, avoiding care interruptions and medication errors (Samal et al., 2021). ACOs can also use HIT in medical facilities to improve coordinated care and provide effective treatments to patients while fulfilling high standards of care (Lewis et al., 2019).

Ways to Expand SHH’s HIT to Include Quality Metrics

To ensure that medical organizations adhere to their patient’s needs, HIT has to be expanded extensively throughout every aspect of the medical setting (Laukka et al., 2020). A simple-to-use system should be built to encourage prompt treatment of patients. Patients can utilize their medical charts and comprehensive tests through mobile apps, and medical personnel can access remotely to patient medical history through a centralized digital reporting system. For example, incorporating HIT into SHH and updating redundant Electronic Health Records (EHRs) can increase quality. This can be accomplished by incorporating specialized capabilities into the EHR system that collect and maintain quality indicators, including drug errors, patient falls, patient satisfaction outcomes, health outcomes, and fatality rates.

Improving EHR systems will effectively monitor vital quality measures, assure treatment efficacy, and improve patient safety (Vos et al., 2020).  Reporting methods can be automated to retrieve pertinent information for quality measures. This will enable IT medical professionals to design software to automate the information retrieval process to collect information about patient health for periodic quality metrics evaluation (Ozonze et al., 2023).  The QI staff in the SHH can track productivity patterns and improve the standard of care. 

NURS FPX 6612 Assessment 2 Quality Improvement Proposal

The HIT can be enhanced by incorporating automated Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) that inform clinicians regarding relevant diagnostic procedures and precautionary examinations, medication administration, and promoting efficient care of patients in SHH. CDSS can determine risk assessments utilizing statistical analysis and segmentation resources. Individuals who cannot undergo diagnostic procedures such as mammograms and colonoscopies can get improved and coordinated care through CDSS (Sutton et al., 2020). To enhance medical care quality, community medical data can be monitored through surveys, feedback approaches, and outreach efforts to gather information on community healthcare requirements and preferences (Ravaghi et al., 2023). 

Furthermore, building a Health Information Exchange (HIE) approach allows medical professionals to access important health information from several medical organizations (Tarver et al., 2023). Population health administration systems can also gather and evaluate medical data from many sources across the community. For instance, EHRs can offer patients’ medical history and disease patterns in the community (Vos et al., 2020).

The SHH can incorporate coordinated care by educating and instructing healthcare workers about information technology tools. These devices enable medical professionals to speed up operations and accurately monitor medical results. Quality indicators such as better patient outcomes, lower hospital readmission rates, and increased patient satisfaction are measurable signs of clinical IT professionals’ beneficial effects on propagating HIT throughout medical facilities (Forman et al., 2020). 

Issues related to the Expansion of HIT

Extending medical organization’s HIT to integrate quality indicators into SHH necess