<p> In 2009 the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was signed into law. As part of ARRA, the HITECH Act set aside $29 billion in Medicare and Medicaid incentives for healthcare organizations. To collect these incentives, healthcare organizations must install an electronic health record (EHR) system and achieve <i>meaningful use.</i> Implementation of an EHR must be completed by 2015 in order to acquire any of the incentives available. Small medical practices consisting of one to five physicians are finding it easier to implement a <i>cloud-based</i> EHR system due to minimal upfront costs and no need for technical capabilities within the medical practice. This study was done using a modified Delphi technique developed by Roy Schmidt to find critical success factors for the implementation of electronic health record systems within a centralized computing services structure. For purposes of this study a centralized computing services structure was considered a <i> cloud</i> or <i>cloud-based</i> environment. </p><p> This study found that the top five critical success factors for the implementation were the following: (1) EHR Training – implementing a strong training / education process for EHR users; (2) Usability – practical application of EHR features in a real medical office setting; (3) Reliability – Specifically high levels of redundancy and system availability. If the system is down, patient safety is a risk, and that is an unacceptable norm; (4) Strong clinical representation in the project to ensure workflows, processes and education needs are met; (5) Support services such as deployment / implementation services, help desk, and online support. Of these five factors, four are actually related to usability of the system, and not necessarily strictly based on implementation. This leads us to believe that the success of an implementation is reliant upon user perception based on system usage.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3628910 |
| Date | 11 September 2014 |
| Creators | Gray, C. J. |
| Publisher | Robert Morris University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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