Don’t drink the Kool-Aid: Tips for easing into medical technology if you’re afraid of EMRs

SoftwareAdvice.com recently posed the following questions to its readers in a survey format: “Are more doctors buying electronic medical records than before? Or, has the Stimulus bill only brought out the tire kickers?“. The results of the survey are available here; while the survey wasn’t scientific and it didn’t have enough participants to draw wide scale conclusions, the results do imply a general feeling of positive momentum towards the purchase and implementation of EMRs.

As an experienced healthcare IT professional I am very happy to see that people are looking towards EMRs and automation to improve healthcare staff productivity. However, I’d like to urge a bit of caution and be sure that buyers don’t jump into the market for the wrong reason. My rule about automation and insertion of software in any workflow process is simple: if you can’t repeat it, don’t bother automating it.

How to choose the right software and technology

For most potential users of EMRs, EHRs, and other “complex” workflow automation tools you should ease into the technology. What that means is that before you install any new technology, ensure that first and foremost it does no harm. All technology takes time to implement and get significant improvements; what’s important is that while you’re working towards improvement you don’t harm your business in the process. Technology should first and foremost not make a practice, department, or hospital worse off than it was before the technology was introduced. Then, it should start improving or “healing”.

Second, focus on interoperability and best of breed. Our desired tendency is to go for “all inclusive” or “complete solutions” but healthcare is too complex for any single vendor or package to do everything. By focusing on best of breed and interoperability you can grow at your pace and choose solutions that you really need versus those that the vendors think you need.

Third, Ask the right questions of your vendors and staff when they’re selecting any new technology. Don’t worry about features, functions, and technology. Worry more about your business (which is healthcare and patient happiness) by asking questions like this:

• Will my patient be more satisfied because I’m using the system?
• Will the outcome of care be improved because I’m using the system?
• Can I spend more time on my patient’s care versus documenting the encounter?
• How many more patients per day will I be able to see because of the system?
• Can I go home earlier because the system helps me finish my work faster?
• How many fewer lawsuits will be filed because I used the system?

Fourth, make sure the technology fits with your desired outcomes (not tasks). Almost any software will improve some aspects of your business — but, the question is will the software improve the aspects you care the most about? When asking technical questions, start with some of these:

• How can I easily transmit my patient’s medical records in a safe and secure manner without spending all day making copies?
• How many more lawsuits will I win because I used the system?
• How will the system be able to increase my patient population or help me market my services better?
• How much faster can I get paid for my services after I’m using the system?
• Can I get secure access to my data while I’m away from home or the office?

Fifth, be sure it can handle all the different kinds of data you have. Most vendors or technology providers focus you on what kinds of data they can manage. But, any reasonable office deals with all the following kinds of data and you need to make sure your selection can manage it:

• Structured data (fully coded ICD, CPT, etc)
• Semi-structured data (machine understandable but with keywords and such)
• Unstructured data (natural language)
• Images
• Faxes
• Audio
• Video
• Chat logs, e-mail logs
• probably many others

Most software systems handle structured data quite well. In fact, EMRs are an excellent way to capture structured data but in my experience structured data makes up only a small fraction of healthcare data. Semi-structured data and completely unstructured data along with faxes make up a big portion of data and medical images make up an even larger portion of the healthcare data pie. Video and email, chat, and other upcoming technologies will be taking up larger portions of database space as well.

When you’re choosing a technology, be sure to look at the kind of data you’re capturing regularly and ensure that the vendor you choose and the deployment model you pick are geared towards the data you create rather than the kind of data the vendor can store. Again, almost all vendors are great at structured data but there are very few that are good a non-structured data, faxes, images, and similar information. When looking at “cloud providers” (online software) make sure that the larger data you capture can be fit through your network pipes.

An EMR isn’t necessarily the first way to automate

While most people who are new to healthcare IT or looking to jump in quickly always point to EMRs as the most important application, there are actually many different healthcare IT applications that make up the “industry” as a whole. When you’re dealing with healthcare IT, EMRs might be a good entry point for some folks but it’s actually more likely that EMRs aren’t your first place to start your automation journey. These are some other techniques I’ve used to kick off automation before jumping into full-fledged EMRs:

• E-mail (beware of HIPAA, though) — internal office messaging and email is a great place to start. If you haven’t started your office automation journey here you should.
• E-Prescribing — e-prescribing is a great place to start your automation journey because it’s a fast way to realize how much slower the digital process is in capturing clinical data. If e-prescribing alone makes you slower in your job, EMRs will likely affect you even more. If you’re productive with e-prescribing then EMRs in general will make you more productive too.
• Office Online and Google Apps (scheduling, document sharing) — Google and Microsoft have some very nice online tools for managing contacts (your patients are contacts), scheduling (appointments), dirt simple document management, and getting everyone in the office “on the same page”. Before you jump into full-fledged EMRs see if these basic free tools can do the job for you.
• Clinical groupware — this is a new category of software that allows you to collaborate with colleagues on your most time-consuming or most-needy patients and leave the remainder of them as-is. By automating what’s taking the most of your time you don’t worry about the majority of patients who aren’t.
• Patient registry and CCR bulletin board — if you’re just looking for basic patient population management and not detailed office automation then patient registries and CCR databases are a great start. These don’t help with workflow but they do manage patient summaries.
• Document imaging — scanning and storing your paper documents is something that affects everyone; all scanners come with some basic imaging software that you can use for free. Once you’re good at scanning and paper digitization you can move to “medical grade” document managements that can improve productivity even more.
• Clinical content repository (CMS) — open source systems like Drupal and Joomla do a great job of content management and they can be adapted to do clinical content management.
• Electronic lab reporting — if labs are taking up most of your time, you can automate that pretty easily with web-based lab reporting systems.
• Electronic transcription — if clinical note taking is taking most of your time, you can automate that by using electronic transcribing.
• Speech recognition — another “point solution” to helping with capturing clinical notes; you can get a system up and running for under $250.

If you’re a physician or responsible for managing an office or an enterprise the government and vendors of technology solutions will be pressuring you to “jump on the bandwagon”. Tell them that Shahid said you shouldn’t don’t drink the Kool-Aid and that it’s ok to be afraid of bloated EMRs and ease into medical technology. 🙂