All You Need is a New EMR....
By Aaron Kanne
A recent article by Becker’s Healthcare pointed out that many big health systems are making the switch to a new EMR. They’re doing this to “…consolidate to one EHR from multiple vendors…” and “…make care delivery a much more seamless experience for providers and patients alike”. Sometimes, however, in order to achieve conformity, health systems sacrifice their ability to be flexible and innovative in solving new challenges for their patients. One health system points out in the article how their EMR “makes it really hard to be exceptional — exceptionally good or exceptionally bad”. Is this what we need to succeed? Mediocrity?
The Beatles famously sang that “all you need is love”. However, every time my daughter and I sing along to the song we are always adding “and shelter”, “and food and”, “water” to the lyrics for fun, and to provide a bit more accuracy to the message. If all healthcare in this country needed was a new EMR for its hospitals and health systems, wouldn’t our issues with cost of care and access to services be solved by now?
A new EMR is one important piece of the puzzle; it will get you connectivity across your points of care, and it can even get that information into the palm of your patients’ hands via an app. However, how does that help you better run your operations? Do all those data points collected by your new EMR get used? Do you have the actionable information where you need it and when you need it to improve your real-time decision-making and manage your capacity appropriately? Do you have access to historical data that tells you where you could improve your processes? Do you have roles and processes centrally in place to manage your day-to-day operations with all the information they need at their fingertips?
If you can answer “yes” to all the above questions (or any of them), I’d wager that you have more than just an EMR to run your health system. You might have an analytical tool that a business intelligence team uses to crank out historical dashboards that show key metrics for your organization. Or, you could even have an operational command center or logistics center whose staff have access to real-time information that guides them to where they need to intervene. Either way, you’ve found ways to supplement and better utilize your EMR investment. Hopefully, this has resulted in positive results for your organization. If not, you need to ask yourself why.
If you can’t answer “yes” to all the operational questions above, I’m guessing you’re not getting the results you want from your new, shiny EMR. As the major EMRs in this country gain more and more market share, we must question their impact when implemented. To truly solve the healthcare challenges for hundreds of millions of patients that we serve, we might have to add some new lyrics to our favorite EMR tune such as “and real-time operational intelligence”, or “and historical data usage“, or even “and a logistical command center”.