As a result of HITECH Meaningful Use incentives, healthcare providers are now scrambling to implement EMR systems. Here’s a quick rundown of eight major challenges when trying to optimize the utilization of all the data that resides in these systems:
- Lack of complete records: The inability to access all data, which may reside in multiple systems, means doctors must work with incomplete patient records.
- Missing patient images: Most picture archiving vendors do not provide a single source for all images associated with a patient. Many EMR systems thus allow doctors to look at basic information but not necessarily all related images.
- Not following best practices: EMR implementations often fail due to lack of adequate user training. Users may simply get by on what they teach themselves or learn from peers.
- Failing to consider disaster recovery: EMR downtime costs thousands of dollars per minute. Business disruption, lost revenue and patient safety are all at issue during outages.
- Missing out on Meaningful Use: Under Meaningful Use Stage 2, healthcare organizations must prove they use EMR systems in specific ways by October 1, 2015. Those that don’t will be penalized one percent of their Medicare reimbursements.
- Lacking mobility security: Physicians want to use their own devices to access EMR systems, but if those devices aren’t secure, they violate HIPAA rules. With the wide variety of smartphones and tablets, putting the right security in place is a complex challenge.
- Missing out on ICD-10 readiness: The adoption deadline has been delayed until October 1, 2015. But providers that wait will be ill-prepared to address the huge amount of coding changes that ICD-10 demands.
- Lacking in analytics: The challenge is locating, integrating, gathering and analyzing all the data to improve patient safety, contain costs, increase efficiencies, and improve clinical outcomes.
To find out how your healthcare organization compares to others facing these EMR challenges, visit the Logicalis infographic “Electronic Health Records: Where Do You Stand?” at http://ow.ly/DSeVP.
And to learn how Logicalis can help you solve the EMR challenges, visit: http://ow.ly/Bg1d1.