Dealing with EHR Dissatisfaction (Part 5)

This post is a continuation; Part 1 is at this link. In this post, I describe a examine the question: When it comes to EHRs, whose satisfaction is important?

Someone commented that EHR “satisfaction is in the eye of who? The physician? patient? government? business?... I only hope it is the patient that wins out.” This comment is intimately tied to the question: Who should gain the most VALUE/BENEFITS from EHR/health IT use?

I contend that if they improve clinical outcomes and quality-of-life (through prevention and treatment), while they contain or lower costs to providers/clinicians and prices to consumers/patients (i.e., increasing value/benefits to the providers and receivers of care), then our society (and species) wins in the long haul. A business model that focuses on short-term gains for “me & mine,” rather than on realizing a longer-term vision that focuses on the common good, inevitably harms consumers and those who care for them.

Beneficiaries of this dysfunctional business model are manufacturers, politicians, lobbyists, providers, consumers and others who line their pockets by “gaming the system” through all sorts of unscrupulous (and at times illegal) tactics. Some might conclude that this is just “the American way,” but based on the huge waste of money and resources in the in the UK's health IT system (NHS IT system one of 'worst fiascos ever'), I believe it’s a consequence of capitalism that has lost its way, along with its sense of virtue.

I contend that the underlying cause of our broken healthcare system is our pathologically mutated form of capitalism —a term coined by John Bogle, named by FORTUNE magazine as one of the four giants of the 20th century and by TIME magazine as one of the world's 100 most powerful and influential people—which he said is a “fundamentally a blight on our society…It says something very bad about American society…ultimately, the job of capitalism is to serve the consumer. Serve the citizenry. You're allowed to make a profit for that. But, you've got to provide good products and services at fair prices…What we've done is have…a pathological mutation of capitalism” (see this link).

The rational way forward with regards to EHRs, I contend, is for clinicians to demand health IT tools that enable them to increase value to the consumer and demand fair compensation for doing so (Pay for Value). These tools should be low cost, flexible, ever-evolving, interoperable, and highly useable & useful for the clinician, patient, and researcher/informaticists. It should combine the best (and simplest) methods for data entry, analytics, decision support, and presentation (display), as well as secure transport and storage. They should also be efficient and accommodate workflows (including referral point-of-care, and mandatory reporting processes), and they should include the capabilities that include clinical concept parsing & processing (i.e., tools that improve the use of clinical notes and aid in inductive and deductive reasoning). In addition, they should provide ongoing risk-adjusted information to clinicians about their individual patients and population (cohort) outcomes.

The use of innovative EHR add-ons (companion applications) is a sensible way forward, even though EHR vendors may resist for business reasons that run contrary to the goal of increasing value for patient and provider, which is not surprising as per Bogle’s criticism and the need for "real capitalism, not crony capitalism that we have now in many industries, especially healthcare.” And while EHRs should be able to incorporate information directly from patients, it should also be able to associate and substantiate it with clinical technicalities.

These capabilities are simply way too much for any EHR today, but they can be achieved over time through collaboration that expresses our views and needs, embraces creative destruction, and suppresses regulatory capture that increases complexity, cost, and inefficiency.

Dealing with EHR Dissatisfaction (Part 1)

For the past few days, I’ve been involved in a very good conversation at LinkedIn HIMSS titled: Can we turn EHR dissatisfaction around?

Here’s a comment from person that struck a chord:

It took the doctor 2 minutes to dictate as opposed to 30 minutes to use speech, edit and/or type. In addition, if the text is not edited in most cases except for those of you have it down perfect, you get crappy documentation that is (oh my goodness) actually used down the road to treat a patient. I can also introduce you to several law suits filed due to the poor documentation of a physician who refused to edit his dragon speech and just let it go into the chart. I can also introduce you to a neurologist who spends 4 ADDITIONAL HOURS a day documenting in an EHR. He has been at it for over a year so apparently this brain surgeon is an idiot who can't be trained. All of your responses to this, even the "this is off topic" are very revealing as to one source of the problem. Like typical programmers, no one wants to hear they have a bad design or the product actually needs more work.

So, to stay on topic, "Can we turn it around?" yes but only when you listen to the experts in the field you are dealing with - medical record specialists and physicians - they seem to be the people you have left out of the equation.

I'm a clinician (clinical psychologist) and HIT software inventor/architect/developer with 33 years’ experience in both areas. What I've noticed is that programmers routinely rely on healthcare subject matter experts regarding product content, the same is often not true regarding workflow adaptation, usability and usefulness issues.

It's relatively easy to create databases and forms for data entry and presentation, but it's quit difficult to construct the inputs and outputs in ways that streamline workflows, integrate and organize complex interdisciplinary data in clinically meaningful manner, generate clinically useful information that supports decisions at point of care, and present that information in ways that promote knowledge and understanding that lead to greater value for the consumer/patient.

Herein lies the problem, imo, and it is where disruptive innovation is sorely needed!

Unfortunately, such creative destruction is often hindered by governmental regulatory capture in which big bucks direct the regulators who dictate the rules that constrain innovation, focus on appeasing big business, and drive up complexity and cost.

A short while later, Randall Oates, MD posted a comment that ended with:

It is time for more enlightened physicians to step up and assist/collaborate the transitions to processes generating EHR notes that are more clinically useful, while meeting basic billing/legal/reporting needs of others as well. Otherwise, physicians have to mainly blame themselves for systems that don't meet their needs.

To that I replied:

Randal, I'd to add to your excellent statement: "...and present, in a concise integrated view, the relevant interdisciplinary information needed to support their clinical decisions, at point of care, that is focused on continually improving outcomes and care value.

For past year and a half, I've been volunteering my time in a Federal workgroup (WG) called the 360X initiative and work alongside Cerner, Epic, and several other large EHR vendors and HIEs on implementing closed-loop referrals. In the WG, I'm a "little guy" offering novel ideas and methods to the "big guys."

I sincerely believe that the clinical and technical folks in the workgroup do want to improve their products, despite the fact that I have had to repeatedly insist that instead of focusing on doing the minimum; we focus on dealing with the big, complex issues, especially regarding workflows.

I'm also involved in several other Fed workgroups that create HIT meaningful use standards. What I've noticed is a general tendency to keep things complicated, while at the same time, minimizing the scope of their efforts. Many times, when I’ve tried “push the capabilities bar” higher--and even offered innovative ways to do it)--I’ve heard the phrase: “We should first crawl and then walk before we try to run.” Unfortunately, after all these years, when it comes to enhancing EHR systems' clinical usefulness and security, there's too much crawling under the "low bar," and a general aversion to trying to "leap over the high bar."

I believe there are many reasons for this and they mostly relate to the “business layer” supported through regulatory capture by HHS/ONC.

After three decades of HIT involvement, I’ve come to the conclusion that what we need is to transform EHR products into “EHR systems” (a term I helped add to the Fed’s lexicon and workgroup charters). These EHR systems would be enhanced through integration with low cost, easy-to-use “companion applications” that fill in gaps in EHR usability, usefulness, interoperability, and protection of PHI.

The companion apps are likely to be disruptive innovations created by loosely-coupled collaborative networks of small nimble companies and individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences, who share, discuss, evaluate, and continually evolve models (types of apps) focused on different use cases and types of end-users.

 [Continued in Part 2 at this link]