With all the initiatives affecting healthcare organizations this year, being able to balance priorities and resources is must. Meaningful use and ICD-10 are two projects requiring health systems, hospitals, and physician practices to dedicate a good amount of personnel and funding, but they aren’t the only aims of these organizations.
How are meaningful use and ICD-10 impacting your organization?
What the challenge is isn’t necessarily the capital dollars — it’s the staffing and the operational expense. My staff is just exhausted. I mean we’re all just continuing. We got through Stage 1 Meaningful Use and getting everybody up on an EHR, and now it’s no time to take a break. It’s full-court press to meet Stage 2 and ICD-10. Four or five years ago, we would have a couple of key projects and really focus on those.
Also challenging about all this is that Stage 2 Meaningful Use and ICD-10 are government requirements and we need to do those, but they’re not necessarily in direct alignment with our strategic initiatives. We’re moving on Stage 2 because we have to do it. We know we have to do it. But then as an organization, we have to keep the eye on the ball on some of the strategic initiatives that aren’t meaningful use: home health and building, growing that product line. It doesn’t have anything to do with Stage 2, doesn’t have anything to do with ICD-10.
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Considering that the deadline for the first year of Stage 2 Meaningful Use is just around the corner, how would describe your preparation and readiness for it?
We have the versions of Meditech and Allscripts that support Stage 2 Meaningful Use. Now, it is really driving usage of those systems to meet the metrics. For example, there’s the patient portal. I need 50 percent of my patients. We have a patient portal; we’ve had a patient portal. Now it’s trying to integrate that as much as we can in physician workflows to leverage that tool to improve adoption of it, to improve, really use it for patient engagement at every level. Technically we’re there. It’s going to come down to how we drive the usage of these systems.
For us specifically, the patient portal, exchanging data through the summary of care record is going to be challenging for us, and then, along with that patient portal, the secure messaging. Those are our focus areas right now. CPOE? We’re fine. Demographics, problem lists? We’ve had those in place and have been successful. We’ve got three key areas we’re going to be focusing on over the next few quarters. July 1st for us is our fourth quarter of 2014 for Stage 2 Meaningful Use, so we’re nose to the ground pushing to get usage of those systems to meet the metrics and then on top of it all is ICD-10.
How have all these initiatives changed the role of you and your staff in terms of organizational decision-making?
We’re at the table in just about every initiative. The value we create is not questioned — “We need you at the table. You’re a critical function just to business.” And that’s what we wanted to be. The problem is that it’s tough to get the resources to do that in a way that doesn’t just stress everyone, and that’s specifically adding people, and once you’ve implemented the system my operating budget goes up because you have software maintenance and all of those things.
It’s a push-pull, and we’re asking our people to do more and more. It’s quite tough to keep all the balls in the air and focus on what the risks are that we need to make sure we’re managing effectively when we’re going so quickly. But we’re all facing this, so I’m not talking about anything new. It’s just trying to effectively manage it. Source
