2 Wk4AssgnWillardL Problem Statement Bedford Hospital has divested from the academic health center it has partnered with for many years after receiving designation as a Critical Access Hospital by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As part of this divestiture, in twenty-four months Bedford will lose its current electronic health record, Cerner, that was provided and supported by its affiliation with the academic center. As a result, Bedford must procure, implement, and sustain its own electronic health record system in order to ensure there is no interruption in the delivery of patient care services, the continuance of meeting and attesting Meaningful Use measures, and no disruption in billing. Scope of the Electronic Health Record After much research and review by the interdisciplinary team created to identify a new electronic health record, the decision has been made to continue using Cerner as Bedford’s EHR. Instead of the Cerner Millennium on-site system provided through the academic center, Bedford will implement Cerner’s cloud-based platform, CommunityWorks Foundations, that is specifically designed for Critical Access Hospitals like Bedford. Cloud-based systems have shown to have strong return on investment for institutions, which is ideal for Bedford (Yoo et al., 2012). Bedford is fortunate to have existing networking capabilities that will allow for a smooth transition into a new EHR. It is less common for critical-access hospitals to adopt technologies that support performance measurements to improve patient safety (Adler-Milstein et al., 2017), but with CommunityWorks, Bedford will maintain the same performance measure abilities it has with the academic center’s version of Cerner. CommunityWorks will allow for a robust clinical
