Ensuring clinical care teams have the right information at the right time and the best decision support solutions to deliver high-quality care is an important responsibility shouldered by healthcare technology leaders. As more dimensions of healthcare rely on digital solutions or platforms technology teams are critical partners in delivering high-quality care because they influence HIT (healthcare information technology) investment decisions and implementation strategies. In addition, technology leaders also need to consider how the technology environment they create affects operating efficiencies, even as patient expectations and healthcare costs escalate.
How strong is your digital foundation?
Putting in place the building blocks for a strong yet flexible and extensible digital foundation is a complex undertaking. Decisions must reflect each organization’s current and aspirational digital maturity, budget realities, patient and clinician expectations, as well as evolving national or regional standards for both HIT and standards of care. The asynchronous implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) across the globe illustrates how these factors affect the speed and breadth of digital transformation at many healthcare systems and organizations.
Stakeholders across the healthcare environment recognize that information is at the heart of safe clinical decisions, effective treatment plans, and positive patient and clinician experiences. All of these depend upon access to both the right patient information in EHRs and Clinical Decision Support tools that provide extensive, clinically relevant, and timely information.
Accordingly, implementation of EHRs remains central to many healthcare systems’ digital transformations. Standardizing relevant patient data in portable, digital form would generate tremendous value in terms of speed of patient care and unity of information. Yet that vision has yet to be realized. Currently, more than 40 organizations are developing interoperability standards worldwide, and there is no consensus on what data an EHR should contain beyond the foundational level.
In addition to grappling with EHR initiatives, healthcare technology leaders must also weigh the benefits and costs of integrating digital decision support tools into the solution ‘stack.’ Ideally, those tools work seamlessly with EHRs, generate clear improvements in care quality metrics such as readmission rates, enhance clinician workflow efficiency and satisfaction, and improve formulary management and workforce productivity. Tech leaders can support these goals by selecting Clinical Decision Support solutions that maximize their return on investment in EHRs and equip clinical teams with the right resources to make better, more informed decisions.
To make this task easier, technology leaders can use three core criteria to assess and prioritize investments that move their organizations along the digital maturity curve.
Requirement 1: Achieving and maintaining HIT accreditation
When choosing or making a referral to a healthcare organization, primary physicians and patients rely upon an organization’s reputation for operational excellence and quality care as reflected in both anecdotes and current accreditations. Gaining endorsements by regulatory authorities as well as a history of achieving higher levels of certification by neutral organizations such as HIMSS can increase prospective patient confidence, boost utilization, attract stellar clinical and support staff, and in some areas secure additional funding by governmental and private entities. In short, accreditation indicates an institution is investing in systems that safeguard and enhance patient safety and clinical care.
Technology investments contribute to accreditation
Technology leaders at healthcare organizations play a key role in securing and maintaining useful certifications and accreditations, which vary in scope. Some, such as high-level HIMSS accreditation, are fairly broad and reflect an organization’s core IT systems relative maturity and capability. Accreditation authorities will evaluate an organization’s data and information security protocols and history, whether closed-loop management of medical operations is achieved, and the appropriate investment in and implementation of Clinical Decision Support systems and solutions. Other accreditation efforts are more discreet, such as confirming that an e-prescribing application that is updated to meet industry standards for communication security, medication selection and dispensing options.
IT leaders can contribute by helping assess and build certification-ready HIT capabilities that meet or exceed industry standards for safety and accuracy. In addition to synthesizing and clearly documenting patient outcome data for accreditation committees, IT leaders often provide usage metrics for EHRs and enhanced systems such as decision support solutions as part of the accreditation application. These metrics demonstrate to assessors both whether an organization is investing in building a strong, sustainable digital foundation, and — more importantly — whether those investments translate into improved patient care, deeper organizational capabilities and knowledge, and more efficient operations.
