Becker's Hospital Review

29 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING 2 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING SPONSORED BY How provider data unleashes the value of EHRs T he costly yet necessary investment in an EHR system ought to have yielded equally large returns, but many healthcare organizations never experienced that benefit. However, there's a better path to unleashing the value of the EHR by connecting it with the digital front door and provider data management solution. What happened to the return on EHRs? The average EHR system costs healthcare organizations $15,000 to $70,000 per provider in year one when factoring in the costs of implementation, training, and supporting technology. The figures omit revenue lost during the initial go- live, when providers are lightly scheduled to accommodate a learning curve. For some hospitals and health systems, nearly $30 billion in federal funds deployed through the HITECH Act for ONCHIT- certified EHRs partially offset costs. But such gains evaporated if the health system changed EHR vendors to: • Appease unhappy providers • Gain better system functionality or customer service • Lower costs over the long term • Enable interoperability Switching vendors makes it more unlikely, for example, that a 1,000-provider system that spent roughly $200 million will recoup the expense of an EHR system. For that system to generate a 30 percent return — or $260 million in savings over five years — it would require recovering $52 million a year. That would be the equivalent of slashing 500 full-time staff. In short, health systems should not look for this kind of quantum-leap technology breakthrough. Provider data: An avenue of revenue return While providers master the use of the EHR, consumer-facing and healthcare operations staff use the provider data management platform to manage data — from onboarding and credentialing, enrolling, and monitoring clinicians' performance, to delivering search and scheduling functionality for patients. Provider data includes not just the people, but the places and services where care is delivered, making it the foundation of the healthcare industry. In fact, all necessary processes on which a health system relies begin with or eventually require provider data. Incomplete or inaccurate information about clinicians hurts the bottom line, negatively affects compliance, and more importantly, interferes with care coordination. As healthcare becomes increasingly consumer driven, a health system's ability to gain market share will depend in part on its ability to serve up accurate, consumer-centric provider data that helps patients find the right providers. Think of telemedicine's meteoric rise during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic and its ongoing ability to connect patients who need to, or prefer to, stay home yet access providers. But challenges abound when it comes to efficiently maintaining accurate provider data. Physicians and other clinicians change networks or add services at another site in the same system. They retire, leave, or join new health plans — or in some cases, lose their license. Statistics tell the story of such constant change: • In a survey of 700 physicians from the American Medical Association, 52 percent of respondents said their patients experience coverage issues due to payer directory inaccuracies. • LexisNexis found that 12 percent of provider locations listed are not current, 15 percent of provider records have phone numbers that are wrong, and 13 percent of provider records are of sanctioned providers. It's no surprise that some of the provider data stored in the multiple software solutions that hospitals use to house it is incorrect. A 2021 symplr survey of hospital medical staff offices found one in three medical staff services professionals (25 of 77 responding) reported using four to six solutions for their job, despite the availability of technology that integrates provider data. A provider directory software solution, therefore, should serve as the single, central hub for all of a health system's provider data. A unified, scalable solution enables the curation of high- quality provider data and produces profiles that can be shared across the enterprise and to patient-facing sites, in real-time. And when bundling solutions that connect all provider activity — credentialing, privileging, performance improvement, directory, and workforce management (even clinical communications) — health systems achieve value beyond reducing vendor expenses, to include: • Reduced readmissions • Improved patient outcomes • Reduced revenue and resource leakage • Increased patient acquisitions

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