Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

Need Help Writing an Essay?

Tell us about your assignment and we will find the best writer for your paper

Write My Essay For Me

Healthcare providers and organizations aim to improve patient care quality and safety. Therefore, medical facilities incorporate evidence-based interventions into the practice to bridge a gap in the quality or safety of nursing care. Need assessment is conducted to identify areas of concern that must be improved to achieve optimal health outcomes. This paper focuses on the need for new telehealth technology, the significance of need assessment, issues in nursing care that will be addressed by the proposed technology, safety requirements and regulatory considerations associated with the use of the new technology, patient confidentiality and privacy protections the technology must address, and how the acquisition of the technology will be affected by stakeholders (internal and external) and end users Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion,

ORDER A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

Executive Summary

Video-teleconferencing is the proposed new telehealth technology to be implemented in healthcare organizations. The choice for this telehealth technology was based on need assessment results. It was established that high school students from surrounding towns have limited access to school counsellors or other mental health resources. For this reason, St. Anthony Medical Center (SAMC) should expand the delivery of mental health resources to young community members to achieve positive mental health outcomes, including improving quality of life. Studies show that video-teleconferencing technology enhances young people’s mental and behavioural healthcare access (Koffel et al., 2018)Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion. Therefore, incorporating video-teleconferencing into St. Anthony Medical Center (SAMC) practices will enable this medical facility to expand mental health care delivery to young people in their community, resulting in positive mental health outcomes. Video-teleconferencing technology will enable mental healthcare professionals working at SAMC to provide counselling and mental health education to high school students in rural areas remotely, improving their mental health care.

Significance of a Needs Assessment

Need assessment enables healthcare providers to identify gaps in the current practice that require improvement. Based on assessment results, healthcare professionals then research to identify the best evidence-based intervention for improving the current practice. The selected evidence-based strategy is implemented in the medical facility to improve the underperforming area, resulting in positive outcomes such as low morbidity and mortality rates. On the other hand, failure to conduct a need assessment affects healthcare organizations adversely. In such cases, healthcare organizations implement a change project that is ineffective in addressing a particular clinical issue or a current practice gap, resulting in adverse health outcomes such as more extended stays and a high hospital readmission rate.

Issues in Nursing Care Impacting Patient Outcomes, which Video-Teleconferencing Technology will address

Video-teleconferencing technology aims to address different issues in nursing care. First, the technology will reduce nurses’ workload. Video-teleconferencing technology will support virtual counselling and mental health education among high school students in rural areas. As a result, the number of high school students seeking mental healthcare from the medical facility will reduce, resulting in a low workload among nurses. According to Labrague et al. (2022)Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion, high nurses’ workload compromises the quality and safety of patient care in healthcare organizations since it exposes nurses to fatigue and work-related distress, compromising their capacity to offer high-quality, efficient, and safe patient care. Therefore, the decline in nurses’ workload will enable nurses working at SAMC to offer high-quality and efficient care to patients seeking treatment for other health conditions, resulting in optimal health outcomes.

Safety Requirements and Regulatory Considerations when using Video-Teleconferencing Technology

Healthcare professionals should adhere to safety requirements when using video-teleconferencing technology to provide counselling and mental health education to high school students in rural areas remotely. The HIPAA Security Rule requires that healthcare providers protect patients’ electronically stored, known as “Protected health information”, from being accessed by unauthorized users (Dagher et al., 2018). Additionally, healthcare professionals should adhere to regulatory measures when using video-teleconferencing technology to deliver counselling and mental health education. According to Mello et al. (2018)Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion, the United States federal law limits the electronic sharing of protected health information. The law requires healthcare providers to obtain patient consent before sharing health-related information with third parties, including clinicians not involved in treatment and family members.

Patient Confidentiality and Privacy Protections that Video-Teleconferencing Technology must address

Video-teleconferencing technology in providing virtual counselling and mental health education to high school students in rural areas must consider patient confidentiality and privacy protections. Patient confidentiality and privacy protection require healthcare professionals to treat health-related information of an individual patient as private and confidential. Clinicians must integrate cyber security measures into their operations to enhance patient safety and prevent unauthorized access to patient’s medical data. Thus, clinicians working at SAMC should maintain the confidentiality, security, and integrity of patients’ health information collected during video-teleconferencing by protecting it from unauthorized users and ensuring the most appropriate physical and technical safeguards. Additionally, patient confidentiality and privacy protections require healthcare providers to obtain patients’ consent before disclosing data to third parties. Therefore, healthcare professionals working at SAMC should obtain consent from an individual patient before disclosing health-related information collected during video-teleconferencing-based counselling and mental health education to other clinicians or family members.

ORDER HERE

The Impact of Stakeholders and End Users on the Acquisition Video-Teleconferencing Technology

Internal and external stakeholders will impact the acquisition of video-teleconferencing technology. Internal stakeholders include the management of SAMC and the IT team. The management will approve the implementation of video-teleconferencing technology in the organization and provide the required resources, contributing to successful implementation. Additionally, the IT team will provide the technical support and education required to implement video-teleconferencing technology. On the other hand, the client, Murray County Central School District, is an external stakeholder that will influence the acquisition of the new technology. The school’s concern for limited access to mental resources among high school students from rural areas has necessitated the implementation of video-teleconferencing technology in the medical centre. This new technology would enhance access to mental healthcare in this population by enabling healthcare professionals to provide counselling and mental education to high school students remotely. In addition to stakeholders, the acquisition of the new technology is influenced by the end users, including mental healthcare providers working at SAMC. The new technology must enable these healthcare professionals to provide virtual mental healthcare effectively. Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

Conclusion and Recommendation

The proposed new video-teleconferencing technology. Muir et al. (2020) reported that online video therapy services eliminate access-to-care barriers among people with mental health disorders living in rural areas. Therefore, video-teleconferencing technology should be incorporated into SANC’s clinical practices to facilitate the virtual provision of counselling and mental health education among high school students in rural areas. Enhanced mental health care will improve health outcomes, quality of life, and overall well-being in this patient population.

References

Dagher, G. G., Mohler, J., Milojkovic, M., & Marella, P. B. (2018). Ancile: Privacy-preserving framework for access control and interoperability of electronic health records using blockchain technology. Sustainable cities and society, 39, 283-297.

Koffel, E., Bramoweth, A. D., & Ulmer, C. S. (2018). Increasing access to and utilization of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I): a narrative review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 33, 955-962.

Labrague, L. J., de Los Santos, J. A. A., & Fronda, D. C. (2022). Factors associated with missed nursing care and nurse‐assessed quality of care during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Journal of nursing management, 30(1), 62-70.

Mello, M. M., Adler, J. U., Ding, K. L., & Savage, L. (2018). Legal barriers to the growth of health information exchange—boulders or pebbles? The Milbank Quarterly, 96(1), 110–143.

Muir, S. D., de Boer, K., Nedeljkovic, M., & Meyer, D. (2020). Barriers and facilitators of videoconferencing psychotherapy implementation in veteran mental health care environments: a systematic review. BMC Health Services Research, 20(1), 1-11. Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

Guiding Questions

Technology Needs Assessment

This document is designed to give you questions to consider and additional guidance to help you successfully complete the technology needs assessment assignment. You may find it useful to use this document as a pre-writing exercise, an outlining tool, or as a final check to ensure that you have sufficiently addressed all the grading criteria for this assignment. This document is a resource to help you complete the assignment. Do not turn in this document as your assignment submission.

Composing the Executive Summary

Explain the relevance and importance of a needs assessment.

• How will the needs assessment help ensure positive outcomes?
• What are possible consequences for the organization of not conducting a needs assessment? Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

Identify the key issues in nursing care affecting patient outcomes that the new or upgraded technology will address.

• What areas of concern will strongly influence leadership’s purchase decision?
• For example, some of these issues might address using the new technology to aggregate data that can be used to:
  • Monitor trends that affect the use of bundles specific to:
    • Ventilator assisted pneumonia (VAP) care.
    • Catheter associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) management.
    • Surgical site infection (SSI).
  • Improve antibiotic stewardship.
  • Monitor 30-day readmission rates specific to congestive heart failure.
  • Support clinical decision making/evidence-based practice (EBP).

Identify the safety requirements and regulatory considerations when using this technology.

• Consider issues, such as meaningful use or compliance with federal and state standards for reimbursement.

Identify the patient confidentiality and privacy protections that the new or upgraded technology must address.

• What information security safeguards are features of this technology?
• What are the potential security risks associated with this technology?

Describe the potential impact of internal and external stakeholders and end users on the acquisition of the new or upgraded technology.

• Who are the stakeholders, and what is their role?
• How might these stakeholders influence organizational change?
• How would you engage stakeholders in sustaining a vision for change?
• How will you address the possibility of staff resistance?

Support assertions, arguments, conclusions, and recommendations with relevant and credible evidence.

• Integrate relevant and credible evidence from at least five peer-reviewed journals or professional industry publications.
• Provide clear and explicit supporting evidence.
  • How or why does particular evidence support a claim?
  • Will your reader see the connection? Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion
• Summarize, paraphrase, and quote your sources appropriately.

Write clearly and concisely in a logically coherent and appropriate form and style.

• Write with a specific purpose and audience in mind.
• Adhere to scholarly and disciplinary writing standards and APA formatting requirements.

Submission Reminders

• Have you explained the relevance and importance of the needs assessment?
• Have you the identified the key issues in nursing care affecting patient outcomes that the new or upgraded technology will address?
• Have you identified the technology requirements, including regulatory considerations?
• Have you described the potential impact of internal and external stakeholders and end users on the acquisition of the new technology or technology upgrade?
• Are your claims and conclusions well supported by at least five sources of credible evidence?
• Is your executive summary properly formatted and 3–4 pages in length, including the title page and reference page?
• Have you proofread your writing to minimize errors that could distract the reader and make it more difficult to focus on the substance of your summary? Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

Vila Health: Preparing for a Technology Needs Assessment

Introduction

Nurse leaders are often tasked with leading efforts around the implementation of health care technologies. Tasks associated with those efforts include:

Conducting a technology needs assessment.

Identifying key stakeholders.

Implementing the plan.

Training the staff on how to use the technology.

This activity will explore some of the things that must be considered when tackling a technology needs assessment.

Located in Minneapolis, St. Anthony Medical Center (SAMC) is a 120-bed facility that is part of Vila Health, a medium-sized system of health operating facilities in the Midwest. Recently, the Murray County Central School District approached Vila Health to discuss a potential pilot telehealth counseling program for high school students in rural areas. Since many of these students have limited or no access to school counselors or other mental health resources, the district hopes that a telehealth program supported by SAMC will fill in an essential gap Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

Interviews

St. Anthony Medical Center Meeting Room

Frederick Mora

Director of Quality Management – Vila Health Group

Alright – it looks like we’re all here; let’s get started. The reason I invited you all to this meeting is that we have an interesting opportunity but I want to make sure that the pilot is a good fit for us and that we’re a good fit for them. So – let me tell you a little about this project. We’ve been contacted by the Murray County Central School District. They have received a grant to explore ways to expand delivery of mental health resources to young people in their community. Since many of the students in these small towns have limited access to mental health resources, the district hopes that a telehealth program supported by SAMC will fill in an essential gap. Ana Nguyen, from Behavioral Health and Tara Jennings, our nursing informatics lead, will be heading up our team in working with the Murray County folks. Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

ORDER TODAY

Christopher Hewitt

Vice President of Medical Support Services

We think this would be a good opportunity for a number of reasons. It allows us to explore expanding our telehealth offerings without having to commit a substantial amount of resources initially. But, obviously, the first step would be to work with the folks at Murray County to conduct a needs assessment. You all know that I’m big on needs assessments – and that’s because they work. When you do a solid needs assessment, you are able to go into a project with clear objectives and a clear understanding of what opportunities and challenges you’re facing.

Troy Holland

Director of Patient Services – St. Anthony Medical Center

One of the issues that I focus on is patient confidentiality. Because everyone it seems has access to Skype or Facetime, people sometimes don’t think through the privacy issues that need to be considered. Ultimately though, the same requirements for patient privacy and confidentiality that are in place for face to face visits apply to telehealth visits. So I would expect to see those requirements addressed in a needs assessment.

Tara Jennings

Director of Nursing Informatics – St. Anthony Medical Center

I’m pretty excited about this project. There’s a lot of energy behind it and already a number of people who want to see it succeed. For that reasons, we need to make sure we understand what the current state is. What do we know and what gaps in our knowledge are there? I already have a number of questions such as – who are the stakeholders and are they going to be engaged or resistant? What are the claims going into this project? What are people expecting it to accomplish and are those expectations realistic? We also need to make sure that the needs assessment looks at technology options and any regulatory issues, such as HIPAA considerations Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion.

Ana Nguyen

Behavioral Health Nurse Manager – St. Anthony Medical Center

I know that telehealth solutions are being leveraged in many counseling and other behavioral health settings, but I don’t know a lot about how the regulatory and security issues are handled. I’m going to want to know what the security safeguards are, what the security risks are, and how the program plans to deal with them. There are so many small details to consider – for example, something as simple as how will students access the service? If they are being let out of class, does that “out” them to their classmates? If there’s a room where students go to engage with the counsellor, is the room soundproof or might someone be able to eavesdrop? These are the kinds of small detail that does have to be considered.

Conclusion

Activity complete! In this activity, you had the opportunity to observe the planning committee discuss identification of stakeholders. They also discussed how understanding the stakeholders will support creating a persuasive and effective presentation. This information should help you complete your own stakeholder presentation for the topic you have chosen for your assignment Technology Needs Assessment Assignment Discussion

Nurse leaders play a key role in the decision-making processes associated with the purchase of a health information technology and any subsequent technology upgrades and improvements. A thorough and accurate needs assessment establishes a foundation for evaluating the overall value to an organization of the various technologies that can be used to support nursing and improve patient care.

The needs assessment you will conduct in this unit enables you to take a systematic approach to developing knowledge about a new or upgraded telehealth technology that would impact nursing practice. The needs assessment also identifies assessment work that may already have been completed and any gaps that still exist and must be addressed. The goals of completing the needs assessment are to:

Identify gaps in practice that must be addressed to improve patient care.
Understand the nature and scope of needed changes and identify associated opportunities and challenges.
Enable a thoughtful and systematic approach to change implementation and management.
This assignment provides an opportunity for you to work through the needs assessment process and present your findings in a way that will help you gain the support of executive leaders.

Scenario
Telehealth technology can be representative of many different scenarios. For example, the technology could be designed to assist nurses with providing care, such as chronic disease management, to rural patients. It could also be designed to enable physicians to access enhanced care strategies from other providers in another part of the U.S. or internationally. Such care strategies might include radiology readings or assistance in an operating room with a new procedure.

For this assignment and the remaining assignments in Units 5, 7, and 9, choose any new or upgraded telehealth technology that you would like to see implemented in your organization or practice setting. Be creative and imagine what it would be like to have any telehealth resources that would benefit your community. Then, imagine that executive leaders in your organization or practice setting are considering the purchase of those resources to improve the quality of care provided to patients and enable medical and nursing staff to extend coverage for patients in the region.

Finally, as a nurse leader with responsibilities in upper management, imagine that you have been asked to determine whether this purchase will adequately address key issues in patient care and lead to improved outcomes.

Instructions
Determine the need for the new or upgraded telehealth technology. Present your findings and recommendations in an executive summary. Include any available assessments and gap analyses that may have been conducted previously.
The executive summary requirements, outlined below, correspond to the grading criteria in the Technology Needs Assessment Scoring Guide, so be sure to address each point. Read the performance-level descriptions for each criterion to see how your work will be assessed. The Guiding Questions: Technology Needs Assessment document, linked in the assignment resources, provides additional considerations that may be helpful in completing your assignment. In addition, be sure to note the requirements below for document format and length and for citing supporting evidence.

Explain the relevance and importance of a needs assessment.
Identify the key issues in nursing care affecting patient outcomes that the new or upgraded telehealth technology will address.
Identify the safety requirements and regulatory considerations when using this technology.
Identify the patient confidentiality and privacy protections that this technology must address.
Describe the potential impact of internal and external stakeholders and end users on the acquisition of this technology.
Support assertions, arguments, conclusions, and recommendations with relevant and credible evidence.
Write clearly and concisely in a logically coherent and appropriate form and style.