STORIES & SOLUTIONS FOR THE MODERN BUSINESS USER

The ERP market has been relatively stagnant over the last two decades but now that there are so many cloud options, many organizations are taking the opportunity to evaluate their business systems with eye on the opportunity to improve. Particularly in healthcare, where organizations have spent the last decade focusing on the EHR to bring rigor to clinical processes and address meaningful use, focus is shifting to the back office and improving business processes, aligning what happens in finance, HR, and the supply chain to what’s happening at the point of care and beyond.

I was recently speaking with a friend about a new endeavor that he is exploring, and he commented that no one has solved the Last Mile Problem – that’s what he’s working on. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the Last Mile Problem describes how it’s relatively easy and cheap to get a product from a far-away factory to very close to a consumer’s house, but getting that delivery to the front door of the purchaser takes a lot of effort and costs a relatively large amount of money. Even though the distance from a local distributor to a home may represent 2% of the journey, the costs may consume 25% of the potential profit.

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.

I recently read an article in the New York Times titled “The Joy of Standards: Life is a lot easier when you can plug in to any socket.” The authors begin by diving deep into the topic, discussing standards around the size, consistency, and design of the 8-by-16-inch concrete block. From there, we learn about standards-producing organizations and how they interact with governmental agencies. The article ends with a reminder that society needs a strong base upon which to build: “In an age of breathless enthusiasm for the new and “disruptive,” it’s worth remembering the mundane agreements embodied in the things around us. It’s [the] very ordinariness and settledness of standards that enable us to survive, and to move ahead.”

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the day-long CHIME CIO Forum that precedes the HIMSS conference in Orlando. It’s a great get-together; there is much hobnobbing and networking with smart CIOs and vendor executives, as well as a slate of speakers that challenge the audience to think beyond our typical world of healthcare information technology. One of the lectures was given by Kate Sheridan, and she stopped me in my tracks with her wisdom and insights.

You’re likely reading this on one of the last days of the HIMSS annual conference, or maybe just as it’s ended. If you attended HIMSS this year, you might be suffering from PHES (Post-HIMSS Exhaustion Syndrome). And before you go where I know you’re going, let me cut you off and tell you that I do not know the proper ICD-10-CM code for PHES.

I was recently at a presentation with the entire C-suite of the hospital in attendance. We were talking about technology and listening to a few vendors predict their future as well as ours. A slide was projected showing data interfaces coming from multiple sources (patient, health system, payer, etc.) coming together with an algorithm at the center. And voila, from The Algorithm (my snarky capitalization added) came forth healthcare recommendations for the patient’s care. It was a moment I’d dreamed about, but never before witnessed.

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.