Two articles I’ve written in the last 24 hours have gotten me thinking that we’ve already entered the post-implementation era of EMRs, even as implementation remains in progress at so many healthcare organizations. While the vast majority of hospitals and physician practices in the U.S. still don’t have full-featured EMRs in place, many are already looking well into the future.
As you may already know, HIMSS on Tuesday released its first-ever survey on “clinical transformation.” According to HIMSS and survey sponsor McKesson, “Clinical transformation involves assessing and continually improving the way patient care is delivered at all levels in a care delivery organization. It occurs when an organization rejects existing practice patterns that deliver inefficient or less effective results and embraces a common goal of patient safety, clinical outcomes and quality care through process redesign and IT implementation. By effectively blending people, processes and technology, clinical transformation occurs across facilities, departments and clinical fields of expertise”
As I reported for InformationWeek, 86 percent of organizations surveyed had a plan for clinical transformation in place or at least under development, and just 12 percent of respondents called organizational commitment a barrier to reporting on quality measures. And though nearly 8o percent indicated that they still gather quality data by hand and 60 said they don’t capture data in discrete format, more than half already had software specifically for business intelligence. This tells me that analytics is here to stay.
I kind of knew that anyway, since the bulk of the program at last week’s Wisconsin Technology Network Digital Healthcare Conference was devoted to BI, data governance and advanced analytics tools, even in the context of Accountable Care Organizations. (My story about this for WTN News appeared this morning.)
“I’m ready to declare the era of business intelligence,” said Galen Metz, CIO and IS director for Madison-based Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin. Though he criticized the proposed ACO rules for being too “daunting” for the average provider, Galen and other speakers said that it’s time to harness all the new, granular data being generated by EMRs and, soon, ICD-10 coding.
It may seem “daunting” now in the midst of all the preparations for ICD-10 and meaningful use, but it’s good to know that many healthcare organizations see a light at the end of the tunnel and know that the future bring better healthcare information in exchange for all the hard work and investment today.
