Managing User Experiences of Multiple EMR Tools
Early in December I went to a Steeler’s game with a friend who’s an Emergency Room physician. He shared his frustration of receiving a patient’s records from a different hospital that uses the same EMR system. The challenge was that the fields were laid out differently than his home system, and he had to dig through the file to find what he needed.
It goes without saying that in emergency care, time is of the essence and finding pertinent medical history (existing conditions, medications, past procedures, etc.) is of the utmost importance before deciding on a plan of action. Anything that delays care could affect outcomes, particularly in that emergency department setting.
Outside of the emergency room, this is also a significant problem as physician practices merge and larger IDN’s acquire other health systems. This almost always results in inconsistency and sometimes non-conformity in dealing with the technologies that affect the treatment of patients, particularly with the patient health record central and seen as the ultimate “source of truth” for patient information.
More and more frequently, during customer meetings, I discover that many healthcare organizations, physician group practices, and even county health departments are having to deal with the cumbersome management of multiple EMR platforms or other clinical systems. Even different health systems with the same EMR platform, are challenged with the different “views” when transmitting/receiving patient medical records between organizations for patients receiving care from two or more different care providers.
In my role as the telemedicine practice director at Meridian IT, I’m constantly on the lookout for innovative, potentially disruptive technologies to bring to customers. At the Mobile Health Summit in December of 2015, I was introduced to iVEDiX through a mutual friend. At first I didn’t truly understand the value by just hearing about it. However, we had stayed in close enough contact for me to see a demo of the platform. I was blown away by what I saw. It wasn’t what I envisioned at all. This platform is able to visualize and represent data that had come from multiple disparate EMR systems and clinical platforms such as Epic, McKesson, and Cerner, on a single pane of glass! And it’s done in a way that is meaningful for the clinician to see and act upon.
We have since been helping customers “rationalize” their different systems through the presentation of important data to enable faster clinical decision making and therefore leading to better outcomes. A quote that always stuck out to me was from the CEO of a healthcare organization who simply said “Wow, they represent (Brand X’s) data better than (Brand X)!” The name of the big EMR company has (obviously) been withheld but the name really doesn’t matter because it is not just about one clinical platform but the ability to take the most relevant data from multiple sources and present it in a way that the others can’t. This leads to better usability and accessibility.
The aesthetic technical beauty is obvious but the back end grit of this platform is its ability to push and pull data from the native data sources. Meaning that when a charting note is made or when there are updates to key vitals or really when ANY data is changed on the single pane of glass, that data is written back natively to each platform’s respective data bases. This platform’s ability to act as an overlay on top of existing EMR systems and push data to and pull data from those systems real time. Health systems who are strapped financially are no longer required to consolidate EMRs or upgrade to the EMR of the month. They can continue with existing systems and deploy iVEDiX to overhaul the workflow. Other benefits of such as solution are plentiful: Clinicians only see what’s required at the point of care. Nothing more, Nothing less. No more navigating to multiple screens or tabs – nothing is more than 2 clicks away. Notes can be auto-generated directly from the patient records or lab results. The platform can be configured to adapt to, and accelerate, the way each health system works. At the end of the day, our objective is to make technology such as iVEDiX an enabler rather than a barrier to care. Physicians can now have more face to face interaction with the patient that hopefully results not only in better quality of care but also improvements in patient satisfaction and in turn loyalty. Quality of life improvements is also another important benefit of such a solution wherein physicians are able to finish their notetaking by employing drag & drop capability before moving on to the next patient.
There are many reasons why electronic health record systems and other medical platforms add clinical value and therefore contribute to better outcomes, but there’s never been a clean “view” that brought all meaningful data together in an easily consumable format. Now, looking at patients combined medical records is as transparent as a piece of glass.
