Are you ready?
Here are some bullet points you should consider:
- 80 percent of your process will involve people and 20 percent will involve technology. Don't get it the other way around...
- Leaders should commit 12 to 18 months depending on Hospital or Practice size to prepare for launch day. You will be working through a checklist in some cases over 2,000 items depending on size and complexity. Don't forget about the Hospital/Physician interoperability planning for communications and linkages!
- The key is preparation and keeping your administrative or executive team up to speed through your particular governance model - there are many effective derivatives of this depending on your organization's size, complexity and culture.
- There are deadlines in the law, not the least of which is 2015. That's when providers must adopt government sanctioned IT standards, or risk cuts in their Medicare payments.
- Before meeting with vendors, re-examine your hospital or clinics long-term technology plan and to what degree it should be tweaked or overhauled in light of federal funding.
- Read the Joint Commission analyses to absorb some of their implicit lessons. Consider which components will help your physicians and clinicians in their daily work flow. This is perhaps of most importance. It's their work flow technology needs to facilitate.
- Re-visit patient work flow and patient treatment processes.
- You must have a heightened sense of quality if you want to create data that is usable once an electronic record is adopted.
- Even with Stark relaxed, physician-hospital communication and interoperability links have been slow to develop - that will change so plan for this (or pay the price downstream).
- Getting rid of paper on both sides will help lower the cost structure. This level of integration must be closely analyzed prior to your purchase decision. How should you/must you communicate with the hospital to achieve maximum efficiency?
- Hospitals/Providers everywhere are willing to help you with some portion of the cost of funding the project.
- Many physician are now trading money for time (quality of life) and as such an increase in EMR roll-outs to hospital owned physician groups. Find a way to work with your provider - today it is all about collaboration.
- That being said, HHS requires requires hospitals to offer physicians "interoperable" EHR's that allow them to communicate online with other hospitals. Although CCHIT certification has been interpreted as a sign of interoperability, most EHR's still do not truly provide it.
- The big incentive for interoperability projects is to support and engage clinicians in quality improvement projects - community wide.
- If you live in a region that has a plethora of providers all using different EMR's then becoming a member of an HIE, or Health Information Exchange is important. HIE's will allow the exchange of data across the continuum without surrendering control of their patient information.
- Consider putting more pressure on vendors to use standardized messaging formats like the Continuity of Care Document - this will save time and money in the design of your HIE.
For more detailed planning and to develop a specific roadmap for your organization, please contact us at http://www.interoperant.com/.
Best,
Don Lyons, FACHE
CEO and Managing Partner
InterOPERANT
