The next year in healthcare will usher in a number of changes, from Stage 2 Meaningful Use to ICD-10, and have many already considering whether their current EHR replacements and health IT systems are capable of supporting their work toward a number of different ends and therefore in need of a change. This change, however, might just be unwarranted, says one healthcare IT expert.
Although 2013 was dubbed the Year of EHR Replacement, John Whitham, Principal of Healthcare IT at ECG Management Consultants, expects to see this trend continue in the coming year. “We’re seeing and we’re going to continue to see a lot of system replacement activity and it’s due to a variety of reasons,” he tells EHRIntelligence.com.
“Obviously, you hear about all the challenges that many vendors are facing and this is going to lead into 2014,” explains Whitham. “There’s a whole spectrum of challenges they are facing from upgrades to poor client service to being able to be Stage 2 Meaningful Use and ICD-10 compliant, and with the consolidation trend there has been a significant wave of replacements when organizations change hands or physician groups get acquired and the dominant organizations prompts the system replacement.”
While on the surface electing to implement an EHR replacement appears to be the right decision, it may be drawing attention away from the source of unsatisfactory EHR adoption.
“While there are many reasons for making system changes,” Whitham continues, “organizations typically aren’t doing a great job of optimizing the use of the technology that they already have and they are making system replacement decisions when it’s not for some kind of strategic reason without looking first at how they can really optimize the use of it.”
That’s not to say that having to replace an EHR system is all cases avoidable. Instead, healthcare organizations and providers need to consider carefully why a current system is not up to snuff. The case of meaningful use provides an example of how the user rather than the system gets in the way of successful EHR adoption:
This has been interesting when you’re talking about meaningful use reporting. Now you’re getting in to the deeper stages of meaningful use reporting when clients are required to get better data out of their system, and what they are finding is that they are not able to get the data because it is not being inputted in a structured fashion so that they can actually extract it. It’s not consistent or standard, so many providers have reverted to just using an EHR as an electronic paper chart or doing a lot of dictation so that data is not being entered into discrete fields.
According to Whitham, what’s missing is a focus on EHR optimization — be it clinical, financial, or strategic. “You really want to lock down ways of doing things and come with a specific opinion of ‘this is the best way to do this,’ because it’s that which is going to lead to standards and better workflow optimization within an organization whether it’s inpatient or ambulatory.”
Even in cases where EHR replacement is inevitable, EHR optimization needs to part of the organization’s long-term plans such as when an integrated EHR technology is adopted. “We’re seeing many clients who are thinking the switch to an integrated system is an essence the magic answer and that can only be the first step because as with Cerner and Epic, you need a sophisticated IT organization to be able to own it over the long term,” adds Whitham.
A new EHR system does not replace the need for a long-term strategy that understands that EHR adoption is an ongoing effort. And while many health systems, hospitals, and physician practices will be looking to EHR replacements to support their goals in 2014, they will still need to determine ways for getting the most out of whatever system they have chosen. Source
