101 Tips to Make Your EMR and EHR More Useful – EHR Tips 6-10

Time for the next entry covering Shawn Riley’s list of 101 Tips to Make your EMR and EHR More Useful. I met someone at a conference who commented that they liked this series of posts. I hope you’re all enjoying the series as well. This is the second to last post in the series of EMR tips

10. Build performance dashboards, not just quality dashboards
Yes, Dashboards can work well for clinicians, but for support people as well. If you start measuring something and displaying the results of that measurement, then the measurement improves. Study after study has shown this.

9. Flexibility with physician devices is important, but you still need to standardize
I think this is a little bit of an evolving issue. However, it’s unreasonable to expect your IT staff to support every platform, every version, and every type of device out there. Tech innovation is moving way too fast and an attempt to go this route will lead to failure. Create some standards so you don’t have your IT staff spinning their wheels and cursing your name for a bad policy.

8. Do time studies
My gut reaction to this one is two fold. First, get the data. Don’t assume you know the data. Get as much data as possible and focusing on the time it takes to do things is one of the best places to get data since this is incredibly important for users. Second, don’t shy away from the truth. If your EHR software has doubled the time it takes to do something, don’t be afraid to find that out. It’s better to know that there’s a problem and try to fix it than to let the problem fester because you didn’t want to know the truth.

7. Make sure IT shadows the clinicians
I’d probably take this one step further. If your IT doesn’t want to shadow the clinician, then you might want to find other IT. There’s no way that IT can help to design the proper system for the clinicians if they don’t understand the daily processes that the clinician has to do. Clinicians need to be willing to let IT in on what they do as well. It takes two to Tango and this is certainly true when you’re talking about implementing an EHR. It’s not nearly as pretty if they aren’t dancing together.

6. Use predicative analytics
I’m definitely not an expert on predicative analytics and its application, so I’ll just give you Shawn’s summary:
Predictive analytics are old hat in most industries. However, health care hasn’t put PA in a real forefront of the clinical practice. If you want your physicians (especially in a ED / UC) to be able to prepare for trends due to environment or time, make sure to have PA built into your EMR and easily available for all providers.

If you want to see my analysis of the other 101 EMR and EHR tips, I’ll be updating this page with my 101 EMR and EHR tips analysis. So, click on that link to see the other EMR tips.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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