Penn Medicine recently hosted a local HIMSS chapter for a seminar on provider engagement. Dr. John McGreevey III, an associate CMIO at Penn Medicine, highlighted several ways to engage providers and tactics to avoid. He outlined some of the significant challenges in getting insights and feedback for IT projects: a lack of interest, a lack of understanding, providers who don’t feel like they have anything to contribute or have the time.
So what to do? One approach is to offer several different levels of involvement. “Think of it like a public broadcasting fundraiser. They’re successful because they offer their audience different financial entry points.”
Another approach to better understand provider workflows, is to just watch providers where they work. That way, it’s easier to see how certain tasks are done and how they can be improved upon.
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In an effort to get feedback from residents on inpatient services, the University of Pennsylvania Health System piloted Brainstorm, a social media tool developed by Intuit Labs where Penn’s chief innovation officer Roy Rosin worked as vice president of innovation. The whole point is to start a conversation. McGreevey outlined one improvement that’s underway thanks to the pilot.
“We have a main electronic medical record system that we use in the inpatient setting. While almost every lab or test result will appear there for doctors to review, there are a handful of tests that get reported in a separate electronic system called Medview (example: echocardiograms); doctors need to remember to check the Medview system for those outlier results.”
To make every test available for a doctor to see in one place, the health system has started to have these handful of results transfer into the main electronic record system, where they will be available for viewing with all other test results. That way, it can save doctors time since they won’t have to navigate between two systems. It will also eliminate the need to remember that some tests may have been reported in a separate system. It also expects to get other ideas prioritized and implemented over the next few months.
Among some of the other recommended tactics were simply asking direct questions. As part of a request for feedback on how to improve efficiency, one proposal involved printing vital signs on progress notes which is seen as a big timesaver.
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Crowdsourcing works too. Penn Medicine initiated its Your Big Idea challenge last year in which 1,200 faculty and staff submitted 1,700 ideas on innovative ways to improve the patient experience. This year’s challenge? Ideas for how to improve efficiency. The finals are expected to happen sometime this fall.
[Photo Credit: Collaborate to Build from BigStock Photo]
