The implementation of electronic health records is a national priority in the realization of health care reform. However, when not implemented correctly, EHRs can be painful.
Ineffective implementations negatively affect productivity and, by extension, revenue. The additional documentation requirements and complex workflows create distance between physicians and their patients. Providers report that they spend too much time “clicking around” the EHR and not enough time interacting with their patients. But as is often communicated to them, these clicks are critical to building a trusted set of structured data that can guide their business. It’s true — every “click” in the EHR creates important data points that can be mined and used to inform the efficient delivery of their practice.
More often than not, this rich dataset is left untapped, especially when it exists across a large provider network. Every EHR stores a huge quantity of data about patient health, provider tendencies, effectiveness of treatments, and system efficiency. But despite the additional time and effort dedicated to electronic documentation, many physicians and practices do not fully leverage this valuable dataset that they’ve created. Without utilizing their data, practices miss the opportunity to improve both efficiency and proficiency of EHR use and, ultimately, drive quality improvement.
If an organization can get their EHR adoption right, they can expect a number of positive outcomes. Some carry clear, measurable implications for revenue and productivity. Others are less quantifiable, but not necessarily any less important to running a successful practice.
Examples include:
Greater patient volume: By aligning resources and streamlining workflows, you can enable higher throughput of patients for a given set of resources. This can lead to more cost-effective management of populations under capitated contracts (i.e., accountable care) or, as we’ll discuss, direct increase in medically appropriate fee-for-service revenue.
Revenue gains: Fee-for-service contracts will not disappear overnight. For many practices, this income is vital and often threatened by the productivity hits sometimes associated with EHR technology. By overcoming this challenge, providers see more patients and are able to generate more billed revenue with their existing staff. What’s more, if using an EHR proficiently, the improved documentation standard allows for billing at higher rates. Compounded with increased patient flow, this represents substantial potential revenue.
Faster cash-flow: Many practices focus on revenue cycle management, but few perfect it. Increasing charge accuracy and lag-time from date of service to post reduces denials and yields more timely reimbursements by the payers.
Increased provider satisfaction: Most physicians did not spend 8+ years in school to spend the bulk of their days fumbling around with software and mindlessly clicking checkboxes. They want to diagnose and care for patients, and are significantly happier when doing so. By aligning care teams and workflows to focus physicians’ energy on consulting their patients’ health, practices and health systems position themselves for improved physician retention and recruitment.
Improved patient health and loyalty: This is perhaps the most important of the five. Improved use of your clinical technology enables your organization to avoid duplication and error, target your riskiest patients, and plan for effective care and interventions. Improved care supports increased patient loyalty, an important edge in competitive health markets.
We’ve all either heard, or felt directly, some of the challenges in deploying and using EHR effectively within a practice or a larger health system. Coupled with increasing pressure to demonstrate improved quality of care, these challenges can seem overwhelming.
When exposed to the detailed data in these underlying systems, however, the path forward becomes much clearer and more tangible. When done right, providers and their care teams can derive significant value from IT tools and become more productive and effective than they had been prior to their implementation.
Greg Chittim is a Director at Arcadia Solutions with responsibilities including the analytics service line and strategic marketing. He has a deliberate focus in health information exchange, Direct Project messaging, clinical quality analytics and reporting, enterprise technology implementations and general strategy and operations. Greg works directly with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) as a Subject Matter Expert on the Technical Assistance team. Through the ONC, Greg has worked with nearly 30 states on their Direct strategies and tactics, and is the Champion for the nascent Direct Community of Practice. Source
