Abstract
ABSTRACTWhile the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) has greatly increased in recent years, the ability of healthcare organizations to leverage their EHRs to improve clinical outcomes has not been clearly evidenced. One reason is that most healthcare organizations implement commercial information systems that are designed to support a pre-defined set of clinical work processes. These systems rarely support every clinical work process in the most effective way and must therefore be modified post-implementation to improve operational alignment in order to better meet the needs of the healthcare organization. This paper investigates that process in the context of a clinical process improvement project. We found that EHR adaptations are most effectively enabled when the goals of the organization and the affordances of system features are known to those using the system. This is because the actualization of the affordances, which result in process improvement, arises from the potency of affordances of the system’s features. In this paper we present the case of a healthcare organization that has successfully modified and leveraged its EHR to improve the clinical process that supports the entire spectrum of care for the identification and treatment of alcohol withdrawal patients. We use the post-implementation adaptation of EHRs to extend the theoretical concept of affordance potency for process improvement from a temporal perspective.
Published Version
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