Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is pleased to announce the Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge. Electronic Health Record (EHR) usability issues can adversely affect health care quality and patient safety. In order to effectively address such issues, clinicians, hospitals, and health IT developers need better tools to capture, analyze, and understand how and why errors occur. This challenge is a multidisciplinary call to software developers, clinicians, and innovators to create a tool that will make it easier for doctors, nurses, and other care team members to efficiently and effectively report concerns about the usability or safety of EHRs to appropriate parties, such as the hospital or practice’s IT team, the EHR developer, and Patient Safety Organizations (PSOs).

HHS Announces Winners of Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge

As part of ongoing efforts to improve the safe use of health information technology (health IT) and electronic health records (EHRs), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced the winners of the Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge. Winners of this challenge created software tools that could help clinicians report EHR usability and safety issues faster, more efficiently, and in alignment with their regular clinical workflow.

“Helping reduce the burden of health IT continues to be a key area of focus at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and we anticipate the winning submissions to the Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge will help with those efforts,” said Don Rucker, M.D., national coordinator for health information technology. “Once the winning submissions reach production, we expect to see how reporting safety issues can be less burdensome for healthcare providers.”

The winners include:

  • First place – James Madison Advisory Group. James Madison Advisory Group’s unique solution for reporting possible safety events launches through a system tray icon or hotkey on any Windows 8 or higher installation. Use of the tray icon or hotkey keeps the user from exiting the EHR workflow, regardless of the EHR platform. The tool exports in the HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Common Formats XML and PDF, captures screenshots, and simplifies the report delivery process. The winning submission is awarded $45,000.

 

  • Second place – Pegwin. Pegwin provides a software platform that can create and send a safety or usability report in as few as three clicks. Using contextual menus and design intuitive to the user, the software makes completion of Common Formats reporting as automated as possible. The second place submission is awarded $25,000.

 

  • Third place – Jared Schwartz and team. Jared Schwartz and his team uses a browser plug-in to Google Chrome that can integrate with IT ticketing systems, enabling more consistent capture of safety issues. The user can also provide additional information immediately or save for a more convenient time. The third place submission is awarded $10,000.

“Improving the safety of health IT remains an important priority,” said Andy Gettinger, M.D., ONC chief clinical officer. “We believe that making it easier for end users to report will help in that goal.”

Many EHR users have indicated the need for more efficient and user-friendly mechanisms to facilitate reporting safety concerns quickly and easily, with little or no disruption to their clinical workflow.  The challenge submissions are intended to help EHR users identify, document, and report potential health IT safety issues when they occur. By promoting heath IT safety issue reporting, the industry will be in better position to determine root causes, provide feedback to EHR developers, and produce best practice guidance.

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

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Contact Information

Contact jshapiro@capconcorp.com for questions

  • Challenge launch: May 22, 2018
  • Submission period ends: October 15, 2018 by 2:00 p.m.
  • Winners notified: November 6, 2018
  • Winners announced: November 26, 2018