As an advanced healthcare facility, the Temple University Hospital (TUH) has been deploying the latest innovative technology to encourage a reciprocal conversation between patients and nurses. Besides, the managers of the facility have been striving to maintain quality rates high to ensure the best potential outcomes in the target setting. At present, TUH could benefit to a certain extent from the technology that would enable its physicians to address the concerns associated with lung nodules more accurately.
TUH has recently undergone significant changes that are bound to affect the quality of its services. According to a recent report, TUH has recently taken part in the clinical trial that involved the application of groundbreaking lung nodule biopsy tools (Temple University, 2017). Known as the Archimedes System technology, the specified device would facilitate a faster identification and more effective management of lung nodules in patients (Temple University, 2017).
Therefore, the technology linked to diagnosing health issues and assessing the causes thereof deserves to be deemed as an important addition to the current set of tools used at TUH. The adoption of the specified devices would make the identification and management of health threats more effective, leading to fewer instances of negative patient outcomes.
Benefits
By including technology into the setting of TUH, one will build a system of care quality that will exceed the current one extensively and provide chances for further improvement of nurses’ skills and patient education. The inclusion of IT and ICT into the target setting will enable nurses and physicians to monitor patients’ states, address negative changes, and communicate with each other and with patients more productively (Ong et al., 2016).
The resulting change will affect the TUH environment on a large scale, causing staff members and managers to revisit their approach toward quality management and accept a new healthcare philosophy aimed at meeting the needs of a vast range of customers.
The inclusion of technological advances into the TUH environment will also cause a vastly positive change in the selected set as far as the promotion of interdisciplinary cooperation and the management of confrontations in the workplace is concerned. It is critical to foster the principles of knowledge sharing within the environment of a healthcare facility and promote collaboration as a critical element of the successful performance of the hospital staff.
The integration of cross-disciplinary strategies into nursing will allow managing the information more carefully and prevent undesirable scenarios from occurring in the context of the specified nursing environment (Schiffman et al., 2019). For instance, the situations that involve the mismanagement of patients’ needs, including medical errors, failure to deliver the required services, and similar situations, can be prevented with the help of the specified technological tools.
The problem of patient safety is a particularly difficult topic to address when considering the setting of TUH due to the lack of nursing staff mentioned above and a wide range of issues to manage. Therefore, applying IT and IT tools for monitoring purposes is likely to open new opportunities for quality improvement and the increase in their security rates. However, the described change will also require a significant financial investment due to the need for the assistance of technicians and the necessity to instruct nurses to manage the identified devices.
Nonetheless, the specified device will have a vastly positive influence on the health status of inpatients, As a recent study explains, “If the patient is in imminent danger of falling, a Stat Alert Alarm, which is built into the system, is sounded by the VMT to notify staff to respond immediately” (Cournan, Fusco‐Gessick, & Wright, 2016, p. 112). Therefore, the selected devices for monitoring and health check should be integrated into the functioning of TUH.
Patients’ safety levels will also rise systematically once the principles of IT-based information management are incorporated into the specified setting. While TUH should be credited for the care and caution with which it approaches the management of patients’ personal information, the cases of information leakage remain possible (Mehraeen, Ayatollahi, & Ahmadi, 2016). Therefore, using the latest technological advances to create additional hindrances for information mismanagement should be seen as particularly crucial.
Obstacles
There are several impediments to the introduction of the proposed tools into the setting of TUH that need to be considered carefully. The problem of reluctance among staff members is the most likely one to happen. Since the introduction of IT and ICT tools will imply acquiring the skills associated with managing complex IT technology, nurses may resist the described change. The problem of low motivation rates among nurses and the unwillingness that they are likely to display can be handled by creating training courses and a series of rewards for passing each stage successfully. Thus, one will enable nurses to develop the required competencies.
Workflow
The selected approach will also introduce multiple changes to the workflow. The integration of innovative technologies would help establish a conversation between a patient and a nurse. With the adoption of IT devices in the target setting, nurses and physicians would receive a chance to keep in touch with patients, thus receiving crucial information that would define the selection of approaches toward handling specific health concerns. The specified option is of particular significance for the scenarios that involve the necessity to monitor changes in patients’ well-being especially closely, such as the setting of an ICU.
The increase in the productivity of communication between nurses, as well as the quality of the interdisciplinary dialogue within the TUH setting, also deserve to be listed among the key advantages of introducing technology in the designated environment. The expected results include fewer medical errors made in the hospital setting, which is likely to affect the quality of healthcare to a great extent (Garrouste-Orgeas et al., 2015).
Indeed, research shows that the problem of medical errors in the hospital context exists and is particularly impactful in the environment of an ICU (Nezamodini, Khodamoradi, Malekzadeh, & Vaziri, 2016). Given the range of services that TUH provides, as well as the fact that most of them imply surgical interventions and a rather long stay within the emergency room (ER) setting, it is highly advised to encourage the active communication between nurses.
Conclusion
The anticipated results of applying the IT and ICT tools, as well as technology for monitoring patients’ health status, into the setting of TUH are also expected to cause a drop in medical errors and instances of mismanaging patients’ needs. The problems described above are linked closely to the nurse shortage in most hospital settings as well as the lack of clear guidelines and nurses’ reluctance to follow them. Therefore, with the integration of technological advances into the TUH context, nurses will be enabled to improve their skills, whereas improved guidelines can be provided to the nursing staff to meet quality criteria properly.
References
Cournan, M., Fusco-Gessick, B., & Wright, L. (2018). Improving patient safety through video monitoring. Rehabilitation Nursing, 43(2), 111–115. Web.
Garrouste-Orgeas, M., Perrin, M., Soufir, L., Vesin, A., Blot, F., Maxime, V.,… Azoulay, E. (2015). The Iatroref study: Medical errors are associated with symptoms of depression in ICU staff but not burnout or safety culture. Intensive Care Medicine, 41(2), 273-284. Web.
Mehraeen, E., Ayatollahi, H., & Ahmadi, M. (2016). Health information security in hospitals: The application of security safeguards. Acta Informatica Medica, 24(1), 47-50. Web.
Nezamodini, Z. S., Khodamoradi, F., Malekzadeh, M., & Vaziri, H. (2016). Nursing errors in intensive care unit by human error identification in systems tool: A case study. Jundishapur Journal of Health Sciences, 8(3), 1-8. Web.
Ong, M. K., Romano, P. S., Edgington, S., Aronow, H. U., Auerbach, A. D., Black, J. T.,… Ganiats, T. G. (2016). Effectiveness of remote patient monitoring after discharge of hospitalized patients with heart failure: The better effectiveness after transition–heart failure (BEAT-HF) randomized clinical trial. JAMA Internal Medicine, 176(3), 310-318. Web.
Schiffman, R. F., Dorsey, S. G., McCloskey, D. J., Grady, P. A., & Directors, N. C. (2019). Evolution of the National Institute of Nursing Research logic model for center sustainability. Nursing Outlook, 67(1), 13-20. Web.
Temple University. (2017). Temple University Hospital participating in new clinical trial evaluating novel device to access and biopsy lung nodules. Web.