How does a Stage 7 hospital improve on its adoption of EHR technology? For Tampa General Hospital (TGH), the answer was mobility in the support of clinical decision-making. The teaching hospital recently finalized its integration of Wolters Kluwer UpToDate, an evidence-based clinical decision support (CDS) tool, into its Epic EHR.
For the informatics team at TGH, the purpose behind the integration is to better support clinical decision-making by improving the user-friendliness of the CDS tool and make providers more efficient in the process.
“We work with the providers to get them what they need, to be able to increase their documentation,” says Janet McNeal, Systems Analyst II at Tampa General Hospital. “My whole entire team is physician- and advanced practitioner-focused. We work with them on a lot of the templates that they use and different smart links that they use to pull stuff in.”
The integrated mobile CDS solution streamlines provider access to patient health information and best practices in medicine in one place, making it no longer necessary for providers to bounce from one computer to the next to find information.
“It gives our providers a wonderful database to help them with informed decision-making at the point of care,” McNeal explains. “With the integration within Epic, they have access to the problem list, allergies, and medications. Then with the Up-to-Date button they can search without having to go find a separate web browser and type the information in. They can just click a button and they’re right there to start searching.”
As a teaching hospital with high EHR adoption, the innovative use of health information technology is becoming more of an expectation among providers. “They are getting to that point. As the culture has been changing within the EMR, people are starting to expect more and also be able to provide better care,” adds McNeal.
Ensuring that integration projects go off well has highlighted the need to work not only with the right EHR and health IT vendors but also those vendors capable and willing to work well with others.
“We have great technical support with Epic and they help us a lot,” McNeal maintains. “Some of the vendors already have a working relationship with them, like UpToDate, so it makes it much easier when everybody plays nicely together.”
This kind of collaboration is already in practice at Tampa General Hospital is the formation of teams from various departments, both clinical and IT, all tasked with job of remaining provider-focused while at the same time supporting a shift to patient-centered care.
As healthcare organizations and providers increase their adoption of EHR technology, they cannot avoid the challenge of integrating new forms of technology into their EHR platforms. Without a willingness of all players to play nicely with each other, the level of integration could prove insignificant or worse completely useless.
A well-informed vendor selection process should take into account not only the quality of the product offered by a health IT company but also that company’s history in working within an ecosystem employing numerous systems and services. One size does not fit all nor does one approach. Source
