Exploring Workarounds: Information Systems in Healthcare Contexts

This essay discusses the concept of workarounds in healthcare information systems, focusing on a real-world problem encountered at the author's workplace: the lack of technical competency among nursing professionals in operating eMARs. It details a collaborative solution involving a technical school and explores the risks and benefits of such interventions, including the potential reduction in patient time versus the standardization of documents and prevention of medication errors. The essay also addresses patient safety characteristics, highlighting areas needing improvement such as human errors, patient confidentiality, and the absence of alarms for adverse events. It suggests implementing Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to analyze human errors, developing comprehensive confidentiality policies, and installing medical alarms with data reporting to enhance patient monitoring. This document is available on Desklib, a platform providing study tools and solved assignments for students.

Running head: WORKAROUND
Information System in Healthcare
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1WORKAROUND
Workaround refers to a bypass of some identified limitation or problem in a system.
In other words, workarounds are commonly known as temporary fixes that illustrate the need
of genuine solutions to some existing problems (Debono & Braithwaite, 2015).
One problem that was encountered at my workplace was associated with lack of
technical competency among the nursing professionals in operating eMARs. The hospital
formed a collaboration with a technical school that enrolled nurses in a diploma course in
technical skills. Technical skills are one of the core competencies that all nursing
professionals should have for attending their clients and delivering optimal health outcomes.
One major risk was related to the fact that spending time in learning the skill might have
reduced the patient time. However, the major benefit was related to standardizing documents,
preventing medication errors and promoting concise patient charting (Cifuentes et al., 2015).
The patient safety characteristics of the workplace include empowering everyone and
making the patients aware of the risks and benefits of the interventions that the hospital
promotes. However, three aspects that should be changed are related to human errors, lack of
patient confidentiality, and lack of alarms for adverse events that directly violate patient
safety (Weaver et al., 2013).
Human errors can be analyzed by performing failure modes and effects analysis
(FMEA) that would promote the identification of the possible failures in the workplace.
Development of comprehensive confidentiality policies, ensuring the storing of patient
information in secure systems and implementing IT security policies would help to maintain
patient privacy. Furthermore, appropriate installation of medical alarms and feeding their data
into reporting databases would encourage healthcare staff to monitor all patients and enhance
their health.

2WORKAROUND
References
Cifuentes, M., Davis, M., Fernald, D., Gunn, R., Dickinson, P., & Cohen, D. J. (2015).
Electronic health record challenges, workarounds, and solutions observed in practices
integrating behavioral health and primary care. The Journal of the American Board of
Family Medicine, 28(Supplement 1), S63-S72.
Debono, D. S., & Braithwaite, J. (2015). Workarounds in nursing practice in acute care: a
case of a health care arms race?. Resilient Health Care (Vol 2): The Resilience of
Everyday Clinical Work.
Weaver, S. J., Lubomksi, L. H., Wilson, R. F., Pfoh, E. R., Martinez, K. A., & Dy, S. M.
(2013). Promoting a culture of safety as a patient safety strategy: a systematic
review. Annals of internal medicine, 158(5_Part_2), 369-374.