By Marcus Perez, President, Altera Digital Health
The end of the year is always a time for reflection, and looking back on 2023, it’s clear that job satisfaction and burnout remain industry-wide issues. So, where do we go from here? And how do we make that happen?
Altera Digital Health aims to bring next-level healthcare within reach through sustainable progress. The core values of our parent company, Harris Healthcare, provide a blueprint to achieve that. One of those values is “Solutions, Not Problems.” Here’s where Altera is putting its time, energy and attention to create much needed, lasting change.
Enhancing usability
When EHRs first hit the market, there was a lot of hype around how they would transform healthcare. Incentives were created to accelerate adoption (i.e., the HITECH Act), and we’ve been pretty successful in that regard. But going from paper charts to EHRs was only the first step.
As usage grew, unintended consequences emerged. Research in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) found high levels of burnout correlate to high levels of EHR stress. Equally troubling, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) suggests poor EHR usability is associated with poor EHR safety performance.
Confronted with this reality, Altera leaned into another one of our values: “Understanding and Learning.” In order to build positive experiences with our products, we knew we needed to better understand providers’ daily lives and learn what did and didn’t fit into their workflows.
We achieved (and continue to do) this by ensuring that, at every step in the design process, clinicians and our design, development and engineering teams identify problems and work together to identify new possibilities. This enables us to build products that support, rather than disrupt, the way providers work.
Advancing interoperability
Additional byproducts of EHR adoption include the data-sharing challenges that emerged. It is not uncommon for patients to seek care at different healthcare organizations, and these organizations may use different vendor systems. Even within individual organizations, different departments using different versions of the same EHR are often unable to exchange complete medical records. No matter the circumstances, making care decisions without access to comprehensive patient histories is frustrating at best and harmful at worst.
While much progress has been made, there is room for improvement. Approximately 62% of non-federal acute care hospitals in the U.S. are able to send, receive, find and integrate summary of care records into EHRs. Until that figure reaches 100%, patients and providers will deal with the consequences.
This brings us to another core value: “Communicate and Share Knowledge.” Having the right information in the right place at the right time is table stakes in our industry, and it is not limited to patient care delivery itself. For example, as more healthcare organizations transition to value-based care models, interoperability will be crucial to care coordination among different providers and accurate reimbursement for services rendered.
Altera has a history of supporting information-sharing, and we continue to embrace it, leveraging current interoperability standards like FHIR to enable easier extraction and consumption of data between solutions. Additionally, our award-winning interoperability platform, dbMotion™ Solution, takes things a step further, enabling a high level of information exchange among disparate EHR systems.
Improving incrementally
Bettering usability and interoperability across Altera’s portfolio converges into our larger aim to continually improve our core products, including Sunrise™, Paragon® and TouchWorks® EHR. Many health IT organizations get caught up in “shiny object syndrome,” always chasing the next innovation they claim will revolutionize healthcare, overlooking existing products in the process. Altera is taking an alternative approach.
Make no mistake, we are always working to bring new digital enhancements to our clients. We want our solutions to serve as valuable assets and springboards for further innovation. Our ultimate priority, however, is to be a little better for our clients every day. This is best represented by the core value of, “Discipline. Unwavering and Relentless Focus.”
Altera is constantly soliciting client feedback, making changes on a monthly basis to strengthen our products and align them even more closely to clinician workflows. That means making meaningful yet management advancements that benefit our clients and their patients today.
Onward and upward
Altera’s efforts to advance usability and interoperability through incremental improvements get at the heart of another core value: “Empowerment at the Point of Contact.” From the point of care to the billing office, we know healthcare can be so much better. It should be easier to access, understand and navigate for everyone involved. A new era of healthcare has begun, and we’re not looking back.
The editorial staff had no role in this post's creation.