WIHI: What's Next for Electronic Health Records

Date: September 22, 2016

Featuring:

• John D. Halamka, MD, MS, International Healthcare Innovation Professor at Harvard Medical School, Chief Information Officer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)
• Laurance Stuntz, Director, Massachusetts eHealth Institute
• ​Jill Duncan, RN, MS, MPH, Executive Director, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) 

What do we want from electronic health records? Well, it all depends on who you ask. If you ask health care providers — doctors, nurses, and other practitioners — be prepared: they often have long lists of frustrations with the very tools that promised to make taking care of patients a lot more reliable, safe, and efficient. Patients often have a difficult time navigating new online portals, too. That's not to say EHRs haven't made many things better, and there's certainly no going back. But what about fixing those daily headaches and workarounds with EHRs we're now hearing so much about, and designing or redesigning the software so it better matches what health care practitioners and patients need? Is the vendor community listening?

 

The IHI Leadership Alliance  has spent the past year learning about the discontent with EHRs and has compiled a series of observations and recommendations in hopes of instigating important changes. Members of the Leadership Alliance also sat down with vendors and officials from the US Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) this past spring to discuss widespread concerns. Among them: the digital transformation in health care has lacked sufficient input from the provider community to inform design; and pressure from government has put too much focus on regulatory compliance and documentation, which has led to rushed efforts to digitize paper records in health care most of all.

 

So, now what? What changes are possible and likely in the near term? That's what our guests sought to understand on the September 22 WIHI, "What's Next for Electronic Health Records?"