Leveraging "meaningful use" thrust for sustained improvement
1.Hospitals should take a long term strategic approach while implementing the EHR and look beyond the MU incentive/penalty avoidance. Meeting requirements of each stages of meaningful requirement will provide short term tactical returns in the form of incentive dollars and penalty avoidance. However, this is also the time to look at the long term goals the hospitals have in terms of improving operational efficiency, quality of care and patient safety, and identify opportunities to move forward to some of those goals using MU journey as a catalyst for change. For example, there is a mandatory MU requirement to develop capability to exchange key clinical information among providers of care and patient authorized entities. A hospital may already have a roadmap to implement seamless exchange of data among different departments. This could be an opportunity for the hospital to develop and implement a solution to interchange clinical data internally as well as with external entities. By reevaluating the ROI of some transformational IT initiatives in the hospitals, in the context of MU and the overarching HIT direction, opportunities can be identified to realize greater value by combining some of the transformational programs with MU related programs.
2.A focused change management effort is required to accelerate adoption of EMR. It should also address the key concerns of the physician community around learning, productivity and ease of use. Even the most successful technical implementation of EMR may fail at achieving the program goal, in absence of a clear change management and adoption strategy. Given the magnitude of the change and the number of users affected, engaging external vendors having learning and adoption solution may be a good idea to stay ahead of the curve.
3.To manage and improve the clinical, operational and financial performance of the hospital on a continuous basis, hospitals should take an enterprise approach to Hospital performance management (HPM). HPM systems need to be in place for tracking and reporting on MU requirements because the data for reports will not be available in a single system. Apart from the EHR, data needs to be pulled in from different sources. HPM will provide a single system to track all the metrics, irrespective the source of the underlying measures. Therefore it is imperative that, apart from investing in EHR and other transactional systems to capture data, hospitals start building a foundation for HPM. Initially it can address the MU reporting requirements, with further releases to address other key financial, operational and clinical quality metrics. While blueprinting and selecting the HPM solution, due considerations should be given to the capabilities for interoperability, data analytics and customizable dashboards, workflow and real time alerting, mobility, configurability and user and security management. This will ensure that investment made on meaningful use provides return which goes beyond the incentive and penalty and spurs further IT driven initiatives for sustained improvements in all aspects of hospital performance, patient safety and quality of care.
