6 EHR Optimization Tips

One thing I’ve learned in 16 years writing about health IT and particularly focused on EMR (now EHR if you prefer), is that the EHR still impacts so many things in the life of a clinician.  Yes, hospitals and health systems have 1000s of health IT solutions that they have to manage, upgrade, secure, etc.  However, the EHR is still the center of most doctors and nurses lives.  How well it’s implemented (or how poorly) has a massive impact on the experience doctors and nurses have throughout the day.

With this in mind, we wanted to focus this month on EHR optimization and how healthcare organizations should be approaching optimizing their EHR.  The challenge with the topic is that it’s often very unique to a specific healthcare organization.  However, we got a number of responses from people sharing what they think is required to optimize your EHR use.  Here’s a look at some of the ideas people shared:

Paul Brient, SVP and Chief Product Officer at athenahealth
Historically, the approach has been to create a standard workflow in an EHR and then teach physicians how to change their practice to mesh with that workflow. With modern technologies, we can make the EHR work the way a given physician thinks and practices.

Gidi Stein, Co-Founder and CEO at MedAware
EMR optimization includes buckets: 1) Workflow efficiency – is working with an EMR improves work efficiency? Or makes it more cumbersome? Most EMRs fail this. 2) Data integrity – can I trust the data that exists in my EMR? Are the problem list and medication list correct and up to date? Is the patient’s weight accurate? Again – most EMRs fail this. 3) Upgrade compatibility – is patient care compromised following EMR upgrades? Is workflow efficiency or data integrity negatively impacted by EMR upgrades?

Dr. Kikelomo (Dayo) Belizaire, Chief Medical Officer at Pegasystems
EHR optimization means streamlining EHRs to meet the organization’s need as well as delivering a better user experience that enables the provider to be more efficient and productive in delivering overall quality clinical outcomes. Such technologies and improvements that I consider “optimization” include voice AI/real-time ambient listening to automate dictation, natural language processing to extract information from notes, and an improved design that holds pertinent information in visible sight.

Some measures organizations can take to make EHR optimization an ongoing part of their processes include to: (1) engage in ongoing staff feedback via assessments, (2) gather efficiency data, (3) provide individualized tailored training sessions, (4) conduct 30-day post implementation surveys, (5) eliminate documentation or data that is not necessary for patient care or does not improve workflow at both the departmental and organizational level, (6) improve inoperability created by disjointed EHRs that do not interface with each other, and lastly, (7) inform your staff that their opinions matter and will be heard.

Dan Rodrigues, CEO at Kareo
Practices looking to make EHR optimization a step in their processes should invest the time in learning the features and ensure team members understand how to navigate the system proficiently.

Miles Romney, CTO at eVisit
Optimizing EHRs, which serve as the system of record in this new digital ecosystem, is key. Determining where in a clinical workflow the EHR will be engaged and understanding the flow will inform where integration points lie, and where logistical bottlenecks may need to be addressed.

John Guiliana, Medical Director of Podiatry at ModMed
An optimized EHR does not disrupt face-to-face, meaningful interaction between physicians and their patients and does not require physicians to complete chart notes long after work hours. Having staff directly interact with the EHR can result in a lower physician documentation burden, a more efficient workflow, and improved patient-physician interaction and communication. And in a time of rampant burnout in our field, a team approach to documentation has been shown to increase job satisfaction.

Lots of good ideas to consider in this list.  I particularly like knowing the features of the EHR and training staff on the features.  It’s amazing how many issues this can resolve.  Team based documentation and the move to things like ambient clinical voice are quite interesting as well.  Making sure the workflow is the doctor’s workflow and the integrations are done to meet that is also great advice.

What surprised me when we asked people to share about EHR optimization was how many talked about the need for the EHR to be optimized with external systems.  There’s a whole downstream impact for good and bad by other systems.  In tomorrow’s article, we’ll share some of the downstream impacts of EHR optimization.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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