Winners Webinar to be held on Thursday, January 10th at 2:30 p.m.
To watch this webinar please click HERE to register or log in.
Event Password: xjWUAtsP
Audio Conference: 1-877-668-4493 or 1-650-479-3208
Passcode: 733 721 593
Informational Webinar Held on June 7, 2018.
The recorded webinar and PowerPoint slides can be found below:
Recorded Webinar Link
PowerPoint Slides
Challenge Description
As of 2015, 96% of hospitals and 78% of office-based physicians have certified EHRs[1]. Clinicians and other members of the health care team routinely work in fast-paced, stressful, and challenging environments. As such, they have come to increasingly rely on EHRs to retrieve patient information, assist in making complex patient care decisions, and ultimately optimize patient safety and health care quality. Despite a growing body of evidence showing the use of advanced health IT being associated with safer care on the whole, it also poses new challenges and risks when deployed into complex clinical environments. Whether through design, development, deployment, operational, or other deficiencies, studies have also shown EHRs can contribute to adverse events and fall short of expectations for safety-related usability, in addition to frustrating end users and posing avoidable risks to patients. These issues are difficult to identify and correct unless the full array of end users’ concerns are regularly captured and analyzed for trends and improvement opportunities.
When clinicians experience usability or safety issues associated with an EHR, their health IT department or EHR service/support team, internal patient safety program, health IT developer, and federally-listed PSOs can help understand and address concerns. To achieve their full potential to help make health IT better meet user needs and expectations related to patient safety, the internal programs of health care organizations, health IT developers, and PSOs need more reporting. The more easily and consistently end users can capture and share their concerns, the better the safety programs and organizations will be able to spot trends and drive improvement.
Stakeholder feedback indicates there is a need for more efficient and user-friendly mechanisms that allow EHR end users to report concerns quickly and easily, with little or no disruption to their workflow. Mechanisms widely available on the market today normally require the end user to either exit the EHR system entirely or leave the current workflow process in order to report the problem. Some EHRs may include a separate error reporting module, but others require the end user to fill out a report through a totally separate mechanism. This workflow disruption is enough of a burden on users that they avoid reporting. Indeed, the greater the workflow interruption the more likely they are to delay rather than report immediately while the experience is fresh and most accurately recalled, or to forego reporting entirely. Clinicians need better reporting mechanisms that are designed to address the end user’s needs and are complementary with the workflow processes and systems they use.
[1] https://dashboard.healthit.gov/quickstats/quickstats.php