by
Nancy Ryerson, Staff Writer | February 22, 2013
From the January/February 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
In terms of training, most hospital CIOs admit that though it can be difficult to rope busy physicians into the conversation, it’s an important part of the process.
“Taking physicians away from patient care is a challenge,” says Troy May, CIO at the University of Louisiana Medical Center. “Having them sit on a weekly or monthly committee is a challenge. But it’s a mistake not to do that.”
Staff, or lack thereof, can also present problems for smaller facilities.
“While some of the meaningful use goals are really great, it’s also added a ton of burden, particularly on small groups who only have a few specialists in office,” says Lauren Fifield, senior health policy advisor for the EHR vendor Practice Fusion.
CIOs recommend engaging the entire staff, rather than just IT specialists. Even medical students can help a hospital transition into being more tech savvy.
“Stage 1 went really well for us because being a teaching hospital, we have a lot of residents and med students who come to you with an eagerness to use technology and computer systems,” says May. “They actually expected a lot more out of what stage 1 was doing.”
The patient engagement challenge
Several CIOs and consultants voiced concern over the requirement that more than 5 percent of all patients discharged from a facility view, download or transmit to a third party their health information. Stage 1 only required doctors to provide patients with an electronic copy of their health information.
“I think one of the biggest challenges will be around the patient portal,” says Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, medical director of IT & Innovation, Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group. “Fortunately, we have spent a lot of time and energy building this up in our group and have well over 50 percent of our patients online and using the portal regularly, but it takes years to do this, and most organizations will not have that much time.”
CIOs and health IT teams are working to build online patient portals that offer enough value to entice patients. That means creating something user-friendly and communicating to patients how to use the portal once they’re home at their computers.
“One method to getting patients involved is upon discharge, that providers actually take their patients and show them the patient portal, and show them how to log on, so they have someone in real time to assist them,” says Tammy Flick, lead health IT adviser at Telligen, a health IT consulting firm. “I think that could potentially be a good approach, because having someone there to help you log on if you’re not computer savvy can really help.”
