Health Care Organization and Technology - the Provena Saint Joseph Medical Center, Illinois - Term Paper Example

The paper  “Health Care Organization and Technology - the Provena Saint Joseph Medical Center,  Illinois”  is a thrilling example of a finance & accounting term paper. The Provena Saint Joseph Medical Center is a 485-bed acute care facility in Joliet, Illinois. Located in the center of the southern suburbs, the hospital provides various advanced health care services and the only health care provider that offer neurosurgical services in the Will-Grundy region. Provena Saint Joseph Medical Center continues to carry out its mission and helping the Joliet community for more than a century. It offers every patient and resident assistance that is safe, effective, patient-oriented, timely, professional, and reasonable. Provena Health, the organization managing the medical center, is very much interested in technology and incessantly reviewing their data and processes to enhance care and services.

Although technology has the potential to ensure the quality of care (Buchbinder and Shanks, 2007), health care executives have a tenuous belief that information systems will provide some form of competitive advantage and will be a chief contributor to organizational strategies and plans (Glaser,  2002). However, for technology-oriented management like Provena Health, the introduction of new technology would probably receive a positive response and less resistance. At present, the organization is implementing a Program Planning Software and a full electronic nursing documentation system in their Emergency Department using tablet PCs to improve consistency of documentation (Provena Health, 2008). Because of this evident enthusiasm to employ various technologies for care and service improvement, introducing a helpful technology such as a voice technology system that can improve nurse reporting would be a bit easy.

Nursing report at shift change takes an hour or more at Proven Saint Joseph Medical Center and the management knew there had to be a better way. On a given floor, up to ten incoming nurses could be trying to get reports from nine off-going nurses at the same time. This means almost twenty nurses tied up for up to an hour instead of being available to care for patients. It is, therefore, necessary to initiate a customized, automated, shift-to-shift reporting system to help Provena Saint Joseph Medical Center decrease their staff reporting time.