Electronic Health Record System Case Study

This case study is about system acquisition process of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) for an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system by Valley Practice. System acquisition process includes first two phases of the SDLC. It refers to the process form the time decision is made to select a new EHR system until a contract is signed between the vendor and Valley Practice. The procedure followed by the practice started with a two days of strategic planning session in which mission, vision and strategic goals were defined. The practice wants to brand itself as a “high-tech, high-touch” provider of high quality and cost effective patient care in the community. Acquiring and deploying an EHR system that provide access to reliable, accurate, complete and timely information to the care provider is critical for quality of care and delivery efficiencies. [1]
To achieve the practice’s stated strategic goal “replace current paper-based medical record with an EHR system” the practice CEO formed a project steering committee whose leader had prior experience with an integrated EHR system. The committee’s other members included CEO, a senior physician, a nurse, and office manager from the practice. Being a small practice, it did not have a dedicated IT staff with expertise in EHR system to support the initiative. The project steering committee …show more content…
cloud based EHR. Accordingly, the committee budgeted for an IT director and an IT support staff member with assumption that long term cost savings from implementing an EHR would justify these two positions. In my opinion at least one of the two budgeted IT position should have been filled prior to the selection of EHR vendor. Although the committee was working with REC, having practice’s own IT team member in decision making process may have influenced the EHR vendor selection and price