Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1092388
104 Executive Briefing HCTec is a KLAS-rated leading provider of hospital IT and revenue cycle workforce optimization solutions including specialized skills staffing, consulting, and managed services. Our solutions help hospitals reduce operating costs, improve quality, and optimize labor forces across a wide range of mission critical clinical and business applications, technical services, and revenue cycle processes. To learn more about HCTec and its health IT offerings, visit www.hctec.com. Q: What are some of the maintenance issues associated with EHRs? How can healthcare organizations work to optimize and customize these systems? BG: It's fair to say there's significant maintenance — almost daily — that must be done to keep an EHR system healthy. A recent study of a large California health system published in The American Journal of Managed Care found that on average 2.5 significant EHR changes were being made each day! We're finding that many healthcare systems simply underestimated their need for daily EHR support and how to practically provide it. One of the consequences of all this maintenance is frustration among hospital IT staff that, pre-EHR implementation, had more time to do the things that advanced the value of IT within the organization. Now they're so bogged down with day-to-day maintenance issues and user support issues, they have little time to focus on the projects that really enhance the value of IT and allow the organization to optimize its return on investment for the EHR system. I think organization leaders should partner more closely with end users. I would say they should first look to partner with clinicians and physician groups to truly understand the user experience. I think most physicians will agree that the EHR burdens them and detracts from job No. 1 — interacting with the patient. So, organizations should work to understand those challenges and put plans in place to enhance the system. Part of HCTec's value is that we create capacity within our client's IT organizations to allow them to focus on the type of work that really addresses clinicians' concerns by freeing them from rote, mundane, day-to-day support and maintenance duties. Based on hospital needs, we can package our solutions and deliver experts with specialized knowledge as either individual consultants or as part of project teams, permanent hires, or remotely via our two U.S.-based contact centers. Q: Can you elaborate a little more on the importance of ongoing EHR maintenance? BG: With the ever-changing regulatory environment, both at federal and state levels, keeping up with these updates is critical. If you don't, you may be getting yourself in trouble from a regulatory perspective or inadvertently create a patient safety issue. The software updates are typically focused on introducing new features, functionality and capabilities that improve productivity, add efficiencies and improve user experience. This is somewhat akin to taking your car in at regularly scheduled service intervals. To the extent you fall behind on that, you're ultimately creating future debt for yourself. There has also been a change in practice among the EHR vendors in terms of how they're doing those updates. In the past, the practice has been to do larger updates at lengthier cycles, so it might be an 18- to 24-month cycle before an update's release. We're seeing a movement to more of a quarterly cycle, where updates can be done in more bite- sized chunks. This is easier to execute from a technical perspective. It's also easier on the end users since changes to the system are more incremental, which means the training and any kind of change management around it becomes less burdensome. Q: How does a healthcare organization achieve ROI with its EHR? BG: I would say that achieving ROI is unique to each hospital system depending on its structure and growth plans. There are hard and direct cost inputs, as well as soft and indirect costs — which I think are easy to discount — but the value of those soft or indirect costs are equally important in many cases. Saint Luke's, for example, considers reduction in employee attrition to be a huge cost benefit. Sometimes hardcore finance people don't give as much credit to this metric, but a reduction in turnover by just a few percentage points can have enormous economic benefits. Things that are broadly considered revenue enhancements are more throughput and productivity, improved quality of care, increased employee satisfaction and improved patient satisfaction and engagement. These are the normal benefits that an EHR can provide. Q: What's next for health IT? What EHR-focused technologies or applications do you think show the most promise? BG: I think there's a lot of near-term, low-hanging fruit around predictive analytics and machine learning. To a degree, all the data that's being taken in and digested by these systems can help drive more appropriate care and improve outcomes based upon whatever the clinical situation or condition may be. To me, it's the opportunities presented by data that would be hard to come by without the EHR and its centralized collection of data that provide the most near-term value and promise. I think we all believe the future is one where there is simply more digitization across the board within healthcare. This digitization will create opportunities for companies like HCTec. Historically, health IT has been more focused on inpatient settings. I think that's changing. Hospital systems are investing more and more in outpatient and ambulatory care, and in care solutions that keep people healthy and out of the hospital. This change also shifts investment in IT. Another trend we're seeing is investment in care convenience provided by tools like telemedicine. While telemedicine is still a tiny portion of overall care in the market, usage will increase as technologies continue to improve and people get more comfortable with the experience. We're already seeing it happen from an inpatient perspective with specialists that small town community hospitals can't afford. Now these organizations can use telemedicine to deliver patients access to these providers. Conclusion: The importance of the right partner In January, HCTec announced a partnership with another St. Luke's. Over the next three years, HCTec will provide support and maintenance services for Epic and related third-party applications at Bethlehem, Pa.-based St. Luke's University Health Network. St. Luke's turned to the workforce solution provider after recently purchasing three healthcare facilities that ran on a legacy EMR. The executive team had to decide whether to tap an outside partner to help facilitate a transition to Epic at the new facilities or rely on the organization's internal IT team to execute the project. Ultimately, the managed services model put forth by HCTec proved more cost effective. "We were particularly impressed with HCTec's ability to deliver a large team rapidly," said Christine Brutschea, ACIO of St. Luke's University Health Network, in a January release. "HCTec is providing in-depth reporting to manage the services and maintain our high standard service level agreements. This attention to detail helps deliver a support experience that is seamless for our clinicians, team members and other end users." With rapid changes in both technological advancements and regulatory requirements, health system leaders around the country are turning to outside partnerships with health IT companies like HCTec to ensure their organization's EHR investments achieve ROI. Health systems need not travel alone on the path to EHR optimization. n