Development of healthcare software and implementing enterprise healthcare IT systems and software has a major hurdle. Often the people designing the system have little experience in using the tool they’re creating. It is rare that a healthcare program used by a physician was designed and created by a physician. Good design should make things easy […]
In December of 2016, the Cures Act was signed into law. It provides an additional $5.8 billion in funding slated specifically for clinical research. Its areas of focus are substance abuse, mental health, brain disorders, and pushing for cancer cures like targeted therapies and immunotherapy. One of the biggest tools at the disposal of large […]
Population health is a growing topic in health care, especially with the increasing pressure to reduce the overall cost of care among the population. Managing your patient populations is critical to improving the total costs of care as studies have shown. In 2013, a study has shown that wellness care reduced the cost of health […]
Clinical protocols are a collection of procedures and medications that have been pre-approved by physicians for patient care. They come in many forms and are created by healthcare organizations under the guide of physicians so that nurses can perform patient care without further physician intervention. I’ve seen protocols most effectively used to allow nurses to […]
One of my focuses has been around Epic’s Oncology module. I spent several years designing and developing this tool, and helping clients make good choices around it. In this series I’ll cover some of the major pitfalls, risks, and choices that an organization can make with their system. These topics include: Protocol Design: Piecemeal vs. […]
Chronic disease management – tracking and quality improvement – is the one promise an EHR makes that rarely delivers. To be fair, almost all of the EHRs on the market offer functionality that can be leveraged to accomplish this goal, but the content must be originally created by each healthcare organization. Enabling chronic disease management […]
Partners Healthcare, has recently reported they “expect a $200 million hit to profits over three years from expenses tied to implementing the new electronic health record (EHR) system.” The EHR in question is Epic. While I cannot speak to this implementation specifically, I have seen this same problem at the other eighty or so organizations I’ve […]
Working to make this blog the place to go for ideas on optimizing your Electronic Health Record (EHR). There are a number of topics to write on, and I’m excited to get going! Initial focus will be on clinical usability and IT maintenance cost reduction. After thoughts on those topics are established we’ll move on to care access, […]