Greenway Health continues to focus their efforts on optimizing their EHR. They are not just making it more user-friendly. The company is working hard on enhancements that enable clinicians to be more efficient. To do this, they are taking a step back and reviewing all the workflows in their system and looking for opportunities to make things easier for their end-users.
Healthcare IT Today recently caught up with Dr. Michael Blackman, Chief Medical Officer at Greenway Health to learn more about the company’s EHR optimization activities.
Job #1 for an EHR
“An EHR should help people provide better care,” Dr. Blackman stated emphatically. “And it should be easy to use too. It’s just that simple.”
According to Dr. Blackman, when EHRs were first rolled out in the pre Meaningful Use days, the primary goals was to make billing easier and more accurate. Better care was just assumed to be an outcome of moving from paper charts to an electronic record. As we have learned over the past decade, this was not always the case.
For many clinicians, EHRs altered their workflows in non-intuitive and non-natural ways. Clinicians had to became order entry experts and screen navigations experts. It is not surprising that satisfaction with EHRs plummeted and have remained relatively low.
Keys to EHR Satisfaction
According to the “Key Drivers of Clinician EHR Satisfaction” Report released by KLAS Research in March 2023, the top factors that impact EHR satisfaction are:
- Enables efficiency
- System response time
- Enables Patient-Centered Care
- Enables Patient Safety
- Has needed functionality
To address #1, #3, and #5, Dr. Blackman recommends that EHR vendors continually take a step back to look at the workflows in their systems and optimize them based on user feedback.
“We must ask ourselves – why is [that feature] there?,” said Dr. Blackman. “What can we take out? What can we put in that makes sense? EHRs are like plumbing – it just needs to work. Every time you turn it on, it needs to work the same way.”
Workflow Optimization Does Not Always Mean A Revamp
Dr. Blackman was quick to point out that optimizing EHR workflows does not mean a complete revamp. Sometimes all it takes is rethinking how the information is presented and what default values appear.
In one example from Dr. Blackman, the team at Greenway noticed that in a particular clinical workflow, 90% of the time, the same data was entered into a particular field by clinicians across multiple organizations. The team realized that this was an opportunity for improvement. Instead of loading that screen with that field blank, in the context of that specific workflow, they could default the field to the value that was mostly likely to be needed.
If you multiply this type of optimization across multiple fields and multiple screens – it’s not hard to see how this can significantly reduce the data entry burden on clinicians which reduces increases EHR satisfaction.
During the conversation, Dr. Blackman brought up an excellent analogy – buying an airline ticket. “Airline websites now default to purchasing a round-trip ticket,” said Dr. Blackman. “That is likely what most people want to buy. There is an easy way to switch to a one-way ticket, which is likely the next most popular type of ticket. But if you want to buy a multi-city ticket, they take you to a completely different screen. They don’t try to do it in the same place, even though technically speaking you could buy every type of ticket a user wants through a multi-city selection screen…but that would be a pain for most users.”
Focus on Optimization is Paying Off
Greenway’s focus on optimization is paying off. In 2023 the company received high ‘Best in KLAS’ honors in several categories:
- 2023 Overall Physician Practice Vendor
- Small Practice Ambulatory EMR/PM: Independent (2-10 Physicians)
- Practice Management: Independent (11-75 Physicians)
- Ambulatory EMR: Independent (11-75 Physicians)
- Value-Based Care: Patient Portals
- EMR-Centric Virtual Care: Telehealth
“We need to make the easy stuff easy,” concluded Dr. Blackman. “By removing unnecessary steps, we make clinicians more efficient while using our EHR. This means less time spent in our EHR and more time with patients. Plus by analyzing our workflows together with our customers, we are constantly reconfirming that we have the necessary functionality to deliver the desired level of care safely and effectively.”
Watch the full interview with Dr. Blackman to also learn:
- How Greenway is improving access to the collected data in their EHR with more dashboards and data consolidation.
- What improvements Greenway is focusing on over the next 12 months
- How Greenway is working with AWS
Learn more about Greenway at https://www.greenwayhealth.com/
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Greenway is a sponsor of Healthcare Scene.
