The Golden Opportunity for CHCs
You’ve been mandated to implement EHR
Why not do it like you know it should be done?
You have a mandate to implement electronic health records (EHR) by 2015, or suffer reimbursement penalties. Why not use your federal stimulus funding to do it right?
Here’s the real Golden Opportunity
While the funding is focused on increasing your capacity and information technology (EHR), the real opportunity for you is to innovate the primary care model in your center. If you do it correctly, you can do both, at the same time, and with the same money.
But, do it wisely. Most attempts fail
Most innovation efforts fail. That is, they don’t increase performance, or they don’t introduce true innovations, despite great effort and the best of intentions. Why?
We see two common reasons for missed opportunities:
- A failure to document the existing process and its problems for vendors who have been engaged to automate a process. This is universally recognized as a key to success, but it’s rarely done without the right outside help.
The director of one of our CHC clients stated it this way: "All EHR vendors that I have ever seen in action strongly encourage an implementation process that starts with looking at current process and then determining how those same things will be done with the EHR. Only after doing this flow analysis is it recommended that the implementation of EHR be undertaken." - The failure to use information technology expertise to help the people re-engineering a process discover what’s possible, and to truly innovate.
Most projects result in underperformance, in terms of truly innovating, or improving practice, when either of the above are missing, because they result in:
- Dramatic implementation delays, and equally dramatic cost overruns.
- A huge effort and cost, with no real improvement in performance. This is demoralizing, and leads to apathy among the staff.
Those are effects of just the two missteps listed above. There are a dozen more.
Examples of why projects fail to produce innovation or result in underperformance
There are a number of reasons for underperformance and lack of innovation, including not using the right resources at the right time, and the failure to document the current process. You can check out examples, now.
You have everything you need, except…
Dr. Gordon Norman, chairman of the board of directors of DMAA: The Continuum Care Alliance, said, in an address to the DMAA ’09 Forum, that we already have everything we need – the money, the tools, the information, and the science -- to provide mass customization for individual health care consumers. The challenge, he said, is to fit all the pieces together in an overlapping, mutually self-supportive and synergistic whole.
Tips for seizing the Golden Opportunity
Consider these factors:
- You should have management and provider leadership that has the vision and courage to optimize this opportunity for CHCs.
- You need a well-designed process improvement and innovation project that engages multi-disciplinary employee teams to design the process or processes that will realize that vision. Read A Sampler of Innovation Projects.
- Access to an EHR or HIT consulting resource, to optimize the use of technology to improve outcomes and improve efficiency. Read what an IT resource has to say about it.
- An understanding of, and strategies to mitigate, the potential losses from employees struggling with change in the system at your CHC.
- Access to funding through the Health Resources and Services Administration, to make the above possible.
Please complete this assessment
Are you ready to take advantage of this opportunity? Do this assessment.