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Deaconess Health System in Evansville, Ind., might be called ahead of the curve in that it adopted an electronic health record in 2008, a year prior to passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act that created the Meaningful Use EHR incentive program.
The organization, which has five acute care hospitals plus a HealthSouth rehabilitation hospital, attained Meaningful Use in 2011 — the first year incentives were available — and moved up to Stage 2 last year. The work, however, continues.
This month, Deaconess started Fitbit integration with Epic’s MyChart patient portal to coincide with an upgrade to the 2014-certified version of the EHR, according to Mike Wade, director of clinical informatics for the health system. (Providers were allowed to qualify for Stage 2 in 2014 with older technology, but that exception disappeared this year.)
Integration with a consumer wellness tracker like Fitbit sounds like a great perk for patients, but it may create headaches for the IT team beyond the technical work involved. CIO Lisa Hobgood told MedCity News that a provision in the proposed Stage 3 Meaningful Use rules, to take effect no earlier in 2017, that calls for EHR interaction with personal health monitors might conflict with existing information security rules.
Indeed, security is front of mind for Hobgood these days, given that healthcare data is proving to be so valuable to cybercriminals. “We see people trying to hack into our systems from all sorts of countries,” Hobgood reported.
Fighting the threat requires nimbleness. “We are constantly watching and benchmarking,” Hobgood said. “We’re constantly assessing and adjusting.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Meantime, Deaconess is starting to offer the Epic EHR to outside hospitals, Hobgood said, much like it has been doing for independent physician offices in its service area since 2010. “The purpose of it is to establish the ‘one patient, one record’ strategy,” she said. “It’s definitely a worthwhile program for us.”
Wade said that clinics on the Deaconess Epic platform are “pushing out as much information as they can into the portal.” Some of these physician offices take online appointment requests, he added.
These are the fruits of a year’s worth of planning and EHR selection that Deaconess undertook in-house and with affiliated physicians before choosing Epic. “We engaged clinicians at all their clinics,” Hobgood said. “That created buy-in during the selection process.”
The health system also won over clinical staff by walking through their workflows and working with them to decide who actually “owns” the need for changing processes, according to CMIO Dr. Dan Edelman.
It sometimes is best not to worry about the technology holdouts. “Focusing on the skeptical physicians will only get you skepticism and angst,” Edelman advised. “If you’re going for perfect, you’re not going fast enough,” he added. “What you do is focus on the need.”
