Information System Management

Running head: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS 1
Information Management Systems
Name
Institution
Author’s Note

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS 2
Information Systems Management
St. Cuthbert’s Healthcare
St Cuthbert is a conglomerate of 3 hospital facilities operating in Australia. The three
hospitals are privately owned and of medium size and they function as a non-profit
organisation (Brusakova, 2016). The healthcare facilities offer a range of services ranging
from routine medical services, maternity services, mental health treatment, home nursing and
social outreach programmes (Chevers & Grant, 2017). These services are facilitated by a
multidimensional team comprising 830 medical specialists and an average of 700 FTE
specialists per year with a total of 500 hospital beds. St. Cuthbert’s Healthcare mission is to
inspire hope, contribute to health and well-being by providing compassionate care to
everyone, touching all aspects of their life that includes physical, emotional, intellectual,
social and spiritual spheres of life.
The healthcare is a non-profit organisation that has partnered with the Roman
Catholic Church to help the less fortunate in the society and members of the community by
improving the quality of their lives by providing healthcare services (Chiu et al., 2014). This
includes people with disability, people of old age and children in care. As seen above,
healthcare majorly focuses on charity work and has its foundation in the Catholic faith.
Hospitals and healthcare facilities across the globe face several challenges in their operations.
These include but not limited to:
 Lack of enabling technologies. According to HealthITanalytics.com, 48% of
healthcare organisations in Australia report that immature technologies are holding
them back from increasing patient engagement and the value for their service.

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS 3
 Medical errors are ranging from wrong medication to misdiagnosis to surgical errors
that could be prevented. According to Dr Ujjwal Rao of Elsevier Australia, out of
100 hospitalisations per year, around 14 dire medical errors occur resulting in 43
million patient injuries that could be avoided.
 The slow acceptance of advances in the field of medicine. It takes medical
practitioners ages before accepting a new way of practising medicine fully (Conteh &
Schmick, 2016). According to Balas, only 14% of discoveries make it to the
mainstream and takes an average of 17 years to be accepted by the practitioners. In
Australia, it takes 3.48 years for institutions that regulate the drug industry to remove
drugs found to be unsafe from the market, and it takes 8.2 years for a new drug to
reach a stable level of prescription.
Some of the issues that are preventing healthcare facilities from performing at the
optimum level are the cost of technology that may help solve some of its problems
(Silahtaroğlu & Alayoglu, 2016). This poses a major challenge to the adoption of
technological advancement in the healthcare sector.
However, in the case of implementing any technological advancement, the four principles of
healthcare ethics must be adhered to. These are:
 Autonomy – the patient has absolute control over his or her own body. Healthcare
professional is to advise and not force the patient into doing anything against his will.
In the end, making the decision lies solely with the patient regardless of whether the
practitioner deems the decision right or wrong.
 Beneficence – healthcare must always put the patients’ best interest in all that it does.
This is with regards to the procedures and treatment provided by the practitioners.