In a lesson for all health care providers, including those in long term care, experts from the field of health information technology (HIT) told participants at an industry conference this week that enabling facilities to switch from paper to electronic health records (EHRs) is much more than a simple technology upgrade.
Speakers at the 7th Annual World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress outside of Washington, D.C., said the health care sector needs to accelerate not only deployment of EHRs but also improve the functionality of all the data the technology spits out to providers on a constant basis.
Lyle Berkowitz, MD, medical director, IT & Innovation for the Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group in Chicago, said electronic medical records “have to do more than just replicate paper records,” stressing the need for physician and provider involvement in making data usable and interesting to access. “How do we make the system usable? Every other industry has done it,” he said.
For an example, he pointed to the success of the Kaiser health system and its cutting edge use of EHRs to reduce by 30 percent the number of office visits its members make. Kaiser has done this by shifting many routine tasks away from doctors onto lower level staff, allowing communication via electronic means with patients, thus avoiding office visits.
Berkowitz said this efficient use of a provider’s time permits more team-based care and frees doctors from less meaningful tasks.
Bruce Metz, PhD, senior vice president and chief information officer for the Lahey Clinic in Massachusetts, pushed for EHRs that are designed at least in part by the people that use them.
“There is only so much a doctor can do with all this information. We need an entire new interface that will bring real change. These need to be designed by clinicians for clinicians,” Metz said.
Increasing the historically slow pace of implementing EHRs in skilled nursing facilities and across the health care spectrum will be helped when a common language is agreed on for the technology, said Rebecca Armato, executive director, physician and interoperability services for Huntington Memorial Hospital and a commissioner on the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology.
“We have to figure out how to create a single EHR among multiple vendors; right now there is no common language,” Armato said.
Charles DeShazer, vice president for medical informatics and transformation for Dean Health System, said data integration is the key for utilizing information for point-of-care needs and improving resident/patient health.
Quoting from a recent study on primary care practice attributes, including EHRs, DeShazer noted the importance of moving beyond the simple aspects of collating data.
“The key transformative aspect of the EMR’s role in the practice was shown to be providing information to support decisionmaking, not just serving as a repository for data. Workflow redesign, providing performance feedback, creating and monitoring registries, and EHR optimization are critical success factors,” he said.