Knowledge Management at National Health Services Essay

Knowledge Management at National Health Services - Essay Example It also has 375 intensive care beds in total, and can accommodate a total of 2000 patients in the intensive care unit. The hospital aims to specialize in care giving for cancer and cardiovascular patients. it has employed around 200 doctors whose expertise includes breast cancer, cardiovascular diseases, musculoskeletal diseases and pediatrics. Reddix also employs nearly 400 nurses and other caregivers. The hospital has entirely integrated faculties for medical tests that are related to cancer and cardiovascular prognosis and diagnosis. One of the major problems that the hospital faces is the difficulty in the interoperability within the department systems. The hospital has different departments that cater to the different information needs. The hospital information system comprises the following six systems: Considering the number of systems it has it is evident that the hospital could have interoperability issues. Interoperability refers to the capacity of different and diverse systems and or physical components of a single system to work together through the use of agreed standards and specifications (Cetis, 2008). It helps the organization to create synergy in the organization. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, being inter-operable, the organization is able to work as a whole instead of working as separate entities. A recent report by the National Health Services criticized the Hospital Administration System of Reddix and said that it was extremely outdated and old and stated its concerns about the patient's files not being available to the concerned caregivers when it is direly required. This is because Reddix is unable to meet the IT needs that are needed so that the doctors, nurses and care givers can easily access all patients' files electronically whenever they nee d them. There are many strategies that the hospital can use in order to bring out a successful change process. In order to do that the Hospital needs to look at the problems individually and then come up with solutions. Specialists of management and healthcare were brought in to assess the current condition The major IT problem at Reddix is that they are using a centralized structured computing system to integrate all its IT applications and the software that is being used was developed nearly forty years ago using proprietary language which could only be used on limited software and did not have a very user friendly interface and there were problems relating to communication with other systems of Reddix such as clinical, diagnostic etc. It was also difficult to connect simple desktop applications such as word processing Reddix needs to develop a business plan that integrates a new IT system that will change its information processing in such a way that it benefits the organization as well as the people involved in it. As technology is progressing as we move into the next generation, there have been changes in the architecture of the information systems that are moving towards distributed computing systems. Distributed computing is a system of computer processing in which the system does not have a central server