Perficient has created this series, “Healthcare Analytics and Meaningful Use” to drive discussions around unlocking the true potential of EHRs with analytics. Stay tuned for this four-part series to be published throughout October and November. We welcome your comments and questions below.
Henry Ford claimed that a good business rule of thumb is to “make the best quality of goods at the lowest cost possible”. In an industry that is experiencing record-breaking numbers of uninsured patients with little or no ability to pay, funding the changes necessary to comply with the HITECH Act and ICD-10 are a challenge. Integrating systems, implementing EHRs, training and educating employees and developing analytics that serve healthcare organizations are time consuming and expensive feats.
To help soften this blow, the HITECH Act provides incentives and, in the final ruling, a relaxing of the Stage hurdles required to be met in order to qualify for the incentives. Organizations that qualify must keep in mind that in taking the incentives, they are attesting to already having made a good deal of progress down the path of utilizing certified-EHR technologies. The resulting impact of both HITECH and ICD-10 are enterprise-wide. Organizations can either react by doing only what is needed to comply or embrace the change and take advantage of the situation for process improvement.
Through deliberate and managed improvement, organizations can generate a Return-on-Investment (ROI). The increases in efficiencies, efficacy of treatment, human resource utilization, reduction in waste and subsequent quality increases will reduce the cost to deliver. Given the complexity of the overall effort, establishing a data integration backbone and analytics with a monitoring solution at the beginning will be critical. With the provision of care never-ending and the complexity of the supporting technologies, the management of change will need to be incremental, a step, module and/or department at a time. Being able to monitor closely the performance of the organization, with the ability to fine-tune or react quickly, will help to ensure the success of the move to the certified-EHR solutions. By adopting early on and encouraging the use of a common “dashboard” service covering Clinicals, Quality, Finance, Operations and Regulatory, organizations can help create an awareness and understanding that lasts beyond the needed change.
As organizations move beyond this time of change, ubiquitous and appropriate access to analytics for all will continue to drive cost down to a reasonable level and quality ever higher.
Want to learn more? Register for our upcoming analytics webinar and you will be entered to win one of two Perficient client badges to the February HIMSS Conference in Las Vegas!
