1. Selecting a Health Care
Information System

2. System Requirements User needs—“musts” and “wants” Technical criteria
Administrative criteria
Registration criteria
Medical records criteria
Order entry/results reporting
Accounting criteria
To determine the appropriate course of action the committee must first understand the organizations requirement. This can be accomplished by interviewing the staff from each department 2

3. “Musts” and “Wants”
Determination of system requirements from what end users identify as essential or “nice” to have to do their work
What info is necessary: patient info
What is desired but not essential: voice recognition technology
Selection committee develops and uses a weighting system to rank criteria identified by workers
Prioritizing musts and wants: scale of 1-10 3

4. Technical Criteria
Hardware and software needed for the desired level of system performance
Type of architecture
does it work with other systems?
Response time
Amount of time between a user action and the response from the info system
One second or less
Downtime
Period of time when the system is operational
Provide 24-hour availability with no scheduled downtime
No history of frequent unscheduled downtime
Architecture is the structure of the central processing unit and its interrelated elements 4

5. Technical Criteria Test and training environments
Separate from live environment
Updates to the training environment does not impact the live system
Support for other technology
Support touch screen entry
Barcode scanning

6. Administrative Criteria
How the system can be administratively controlled
Security levels to comply with regulatory and legal requirements
Different levels of security for different users
Each group should have access to info its clients 6

7. Administrative Criteria
Report capabilities
Allow for specific info to be extracted from the database
Ease of use
Restoring data
Ability to restore data from storage device

8. Registration criteria
To ensure that the client is properly identified
Unique identifier for the patient
Multiple registration sites
Ability to update the info
Track patients location within the institution

9. Order entry criteria Ensure accurate entry of orders
Details of the order
Frequency of med
Notification about duplicate entry
Identify the person who entered the order
Generate client’s charges

10. Medical record criteria
Support the storage of data
Allow user to access longitudinal record of pt
Inquiries about the patient using various identifiers
E.g. ICD-9 code
Translate Dx and procedures into numeric code

11. Accounting criteria Facilitate reimbursement of services
Generate summaries of all bills
Allow to user to enter pt insurance verification data, insurance plan
Link with physician billing services

12. Questions?