Meaningful Use

A collection of 30  Posts

Guest Article: Creating a Culture of Adoption for EHRs and Health IT

It is general knowledge among seasoned EHR implementers that EHR technology is not the primary concern when promoting EHR adoption (while there are many areas of potential improvements, the tech is generally “good enough” in most cases). There are, however, many challenges surrounding the deployments EHRs and one of the biggest is that not enough training or pre work done to prepare staff and resources. A great way to ensure EHR success is by creating a “Culture of Adoption,” which is something I discussed at length with my friend John Lynn after he attended a recent “think tank” style event hosted at TEDMED by the Breakaway Group (a Xerox Company).

I recently posted about my upcoming Healthcare Unbound presentation on why healthcare disruption is happening too slowly and requested some thoughts from my readers. This morning I woke up to receive these terrific remarks from Jeroen Bouwens which I’m sharing with permission: My theory as to what is holding back certain types of innovation in healthcare is the idea of distributing liability. As long as the ultimate responsibility, and therefore liability, lies with the Medical practitioner, they are extremely reluctant to accept automated systems making medical decisions.

Today’s reality of patient management is “disjointed care” and most of the collaborators in a patient’s care team don’t know what each other is doing for the patient in real time. Knowing all the different participants in the patient’s care team (providers, payers, family members, etc.) and coordinating and integrating their electronic activities is what successful EHRs must handle with ease as they look to graduate from basic retrospective documentation systems to modern patient collaboration platforms.

There are important differences between the health care providers who truly reap the benefits of switching to EMR, and those who don’t. I’ve covered some of these differences before and I was pleased to see that Katie Matlack, Medical Analyst at Software Advice, actually went a step further and interviewed representatives of three health providers using EMRs now, identifying some key takeaways to extend the conversation. Below are four tips, and for the other four tips, you can view the entire article on her blog.

In case you haven’t seen it, MU attestations data is now available on Data.gov and it includes analyzable vendor statistics. The data set merges information about the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs attestations with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Certified Health IT Products List. This new dataset enables systematic analysis of the distribution of certified EHR vendors and products among those providers that have attested to meaningful use within the CMS EHR Incentive Programs.

One of the most important activities you can undertake before you begin your EHR implementation journey is to standardize and simplify your processes to help prepare for automation. Unlike humans, which can handle diversity, computers hate variations. Before you begin your software selection process, get help from a practice consultant to reduce the number of appointment types you manage, reduce the number of different forms you use, ensure that your charting categories (“Labs”, “Notes”, etc.

Productivity loss and workflow disruptions are commonplace as our industry gets on the Meaningful Use bandwagon and is starting to adopt EHR systems at a slightly more rapid pace than in previous years (things aren’t really as rosy as many think, but the pace is picking up). The reason we have productivity loss is that we focus changing the behaviors of our most expensive resources too early in our automation journeys – we go after doctors first.

I met researchers from Macadamian, a global UI design and innovation studio that has been doing some great work in the health IT usability space, at the recent EHR Usability Symposium held at NIST a couple of months ago. I was immediately impressed by their work so when they asked me to work with them on presenting NIST’s new Usability Criteria for Health IT and EHR Software document, I welcomed the opportunity.

The FDA released the (currently non-binding) “Draft Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff on Mobile Medical Applications” earlier this week. I knew many of my clients and readers would be asking about the ramifications of this new guidance so I read the document as soon as it came out. In general I was impressed by the FDA’s balanced approach to patient safety and their desire not to stifle competition; overall I thought they were not looking to overreach their purview and I think they succeeded (except for the part on clinical decision support, discussed further below).

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