STORIES & SOLUTIONS FOR THE MODERN BUSINESS USER

Rural acute care and critical access hospitals face similar obstacles as their larger healthcare counterparts, but they also face unique challenges. Impediments range from aligning services to their communities’ needs and trying to stay independent amid heavy merger and acquisition activity to addressing value-based care and creating more efficient processes that optimize resources, lower costs, and support patient safety and quality of care goals. Most hospitals use some form of EHR technology to improve clinical efficiency, but dissatisfaction with current EHRs are leading many healthcare organizations to consider EMR/EHR replacement. Providers will often seek third-party consulting partners to collaborate with the EHR vendor and key stakeholders to conduct a rapid, efficient and streamlined implementation.

Recently, WBUR posted an article about a parody Twitter account that satirizes one of the biggest electronic health record (EHR) software vendors: Epic. When the reporter reached out to Epic to ask them if they had any response or reaction to the parody account, Epic replied, “We do not.”

I’m a big fan of fellow pediatrician blogger Bryan Vartabedian’s 33 Charts. While I spent a few years at Texas Children’s Hospital, our paths never crossed, and that’s a shanda because Dr. V says smart things in an entertaining way. If you don’t know his work, you should.

EHR Implementation projects from the last decade have been costly and time-consuming projects for most healthcare systems in the country. Making an implementation successful often requires a ‘get live, then optimize’ mentality. When the organization is ready to optimize, discussions about data management are typically top of the priority list.

With New Year’s Day in our very recent past, I thought it appropriate to propose some resolutions for those of us in the healthcare IT trenches. These are in no particular order, and like all resolutions, I make no commitment to following any of them myself.

I have to admit that doctors often confuse me. Now I know, if you’re a regular reader of mine, you might think that’s odd because . . . I am a doctor. Yet still, sometimes my colleagues do things that I cannot explain. Because I focus on the cross section between technology and medicine, you can reasonably predict that I’m not going to be writing about why doctors choose a foreign car versus a domestic one. Nope, I want to deal with doctors and their habit of mouse clicking when no mouse click is needed.

A topic at the forefront of many hospitals we work with is how to address the ever-growing problem of physician burnout. There are certainly many factors, however a primary one is the dissatisfaction with the electronic health record (EHR) and extra time spent outside of patient care completing documentation.

Let me recap my previous blog post: I made the argument that the customer (aka EHR user) doesn’t always know what she wants, and it’s up to the IT analyst to provide for the users’ needs. I also posited that standardization and EHR vendor alignment is often a good thing, and that sophisticated healthcare systems across the country are pulling out perfectly good build to replace it with recommended configuration from the company that produces the software. Some IT folks are understandably uncomfortable with these changes because they now see themselves as “the heavy” and must tell end users that they can’t always get what they want.

You may have been taught that the customer is always right, but it’s been well-established that the customer is most certainly not always right (see my posts here and here). Plenty of successful, innovative business owners point out the fact that often, the customer has no clue:

I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about curation recently. By curation I mean allowing experts to make decisions for those of us who are not experts. My first experience with curation happened four or five years ago. I walked into an optical store with my wife to look for some new frames. My vision is so poor that when I don’t have my prescription glasses on, I can’t really see much of anything at all. So, you can imagine how helpless I am when I take off my glasses to put on a pair of frames with no lenses. Sure, I can look at the mirror from an inch away and maybe have an opinion, but c’mon! That’s not very effective. Hence, I typically just put myself in the hands of my wife.