Process Centered Organizations Essay

Process Centered Organizations are planned to create maximum value, innovation and development. A Process Centered Organization can sustain its processes at a high level. A process centered organizational design sorts out the best blend of structure and process. By carrying out a process-centered cycle, healthcare organizations can achieve their goals by changing the way workflow is defined and the way the people working in these organizations perceive their roles. In all healthcare organizations, the focal point is the patient. From a patient’s perspective, how much he or she is valued is important. Healthcare organizations around the globe are making efforts to satisfy their customers in the best possible ways. But modern times require these organizations to engage in the use of knowledge, skills, tools, techniques and systems to improve and direct processes towards creating value for the patient. One such example of a healthcare organization is Eastern Maine Medical Center (EMMC), Bangor, Maine. The organization in fact received the 2008 HIMSS Davies Award. This prestigious award is given to selected hospitals in the United States for effectively using information technology to improve the safety and quality of patient care. EMMC represents an immaculate example of how to apply and make use of electronic health records (EHR) along with other technologies in order to ensure delivery of quality and evidence based healthcare. The EHR system was installed as part of EMMC’s Patient First Initiatives Program. This was an effort to provide high quality patient care by changing care delivery, adopting a patient-focused culture and implementing a technology plan to support the care delivery process. EMMC’s use of data derived from its healthcare IT systems is a shining example of how to drive performance improvement, quality and improve care in response to state and national reporting requirements. †(HIMMS news, 2008) Eric Hartz, MD, EMMC chief medical information officer, says this award is a crowning achievement for EMMC’s employees. He emphasized that in the end, it is the patients of the region who will benefit from EMMC. The organizations staff worked hard for nearly a decade to implement the most advanced computer systems on the market to allow instantaneous sharing of health information among all healthcare providers involved in a patient’s care. â€Å"When the software that was currently available wasn’t doing the job we wanted, we challenged our vendors to work with us to build something better. It has been a tremendous collaboration†, said MR. Hartz. The services offered by these new systems are incredible. For example they improved ratio from electronic to hand written orders from 5:1 to 14:1. It eliminated 160 minutes from order writing to pharmacy receipt of orders, plus the average time for pharmacist review decreased 52 percent, from 50. 8 minutes to 24. 3 minutes. It also decreased overall medication incidents by 27 percent etc. (Cerner, 2008) The new systems in EMMC offer decision-support to help guarantee that patients receive the safest and best care achievable. EMMC’s providers and staff spent numerous hours working on the clinical systems to continuously make them better. They involved themselves and participated with the organizations experts in the information systems department and this allowed them to streamline all their processes and improve employee productivity. After several years of preparation, improvement, and execution, the nurses, physicians, and other healthcare professionals adopted advancements in information technology. They are now helping to bring the latest advancements and technology in patient care to the people who arrive at the doorstep of their hospital from any side of Maine. In process centering, processes are not newly created by organizations; in fact existing processes are modernized to meet the organization’s goals. What process centering does is to modify the perception and bring the process into focus. And this is exactly what EMMC did in order to provide higher levels of satisfactions to their patients and customers.