The Path to Meaningless Use
The Path to Meaningless Use:
As many of you know the ACE 2010 event just took place last week. As I was pouring through some of the handouts I couldn’t help but be drawn into the “Handy Trail Guide” which Allscripts has touted as “The Path to Meaningful Use” This is a great high level guide to reaching Stage 1 of Meaningful Use – Capture and Share Data.
The more I read through this the more I thought of how clients will be looking at this with an eye to the shortest path to receiving their stimulus check, and rightfully so – every group should be looking to take advantage of this, from the largest hospital to the smallest single-doc practice. However, I wanted to make sure we don’t lose sight of the forest from the trees here and bring this trail guide back to the true reason for the stimulus – improving patient care! Hence the genesis of this article, The Path to Meaningless Use.
There are a couple of main points I’d like to highlight before dissecting the step by step approach.
- Sell benefits of the EHR – I feel like this process is woefully underappreciated. In order for your rollout to be a success you absolutely need buy-in from all end-users, including physicians, nurses, data-entry folks and really any person that will touch the EHR on any level. How is this product going to improve their productivity? Make their job easier? Make their work experience more enjoyable?
- Change is a good thing – Change is the process by which innovation and improvement are instilled. I know that people are comfortable with the status-quo and yes, change for change sake is useless, but there’s a reason for change here, I promise! Challenge your co-workers to look at everything objectively and really question if the products and processes currently in place really make sense or if there could be a better way.
- Make concessions, don’t over-customize – The product is designed to work best when used in an out of the box capacity, sans customizations. The reality is that you probably aren’t going to be able to sell the idea of changing every workflow to fit the product, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Ultimately in the long term the stability of the system is most closely tied to how close you stay to it’s intended use, therefore fight for those process changes to model the system, there’s a reason the EHR was designed the way it was! This point goes back to selling the benefits, be able to show how using the new workflows will actually improve the end-user experience!
With those main points made here are a few comments on the step in the Path to Meaningless Use, enjoy!
- Understand Stimulus – Don’t just aim for the stage 1 level of capturing and sharing data, yes this can improve productivity but don’t lose sight of the true end goal, improving patient care.
- Assess Gaps – Be honest with yourself. Are the tools you are using as efficient as they could be? Don’t keep old processes and tools in use just because people are “comfortable” with them, if there is a better tool out there, use it! Sometimes taking people out of their comfort zone is exactly what is needed to promote healthy growth.
- Design New Workflows – Don’t be unwilling to change workflows simply because that’s the way it’s always been done. Be prepared to pitch workflow re-design to physicians with benefits for them in mind.
- Upgrade EHR & Stimulus Set – Don’t rush this upgrade. There are many factors that go into an upgrade (depending on how many versions you are jumping) and simply upgrading for the sake of getting the stimulus approved version may end up biting you if you haven’t correctly re-worked process flows to use the EHR in a meaningful way.
- Rollout – During training stress benefits to end users, a 3 day crash course on the new EHR system is great but if you can’t prove to your end users why the new product and workflows make sense you aren’t going to receive full buy in and consequently won’t get the most out of the product.
- Begin 90-day Meaningful Use – Metrics should be kept on an ongoing basis, not just for 90 days. It’s great to hit the 90 day plateau to receive the stimulus check but the true purpose of the EHR is to improve patient treatment, and you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
- Report & Claim Stimulus – Nothing meaningless about this step, claim the money and move on to the next stage!
