Becker's Hospital Review

81 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING 2 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING SPONSORED BY Getting the most out of your healthcare application investment By Tabitha Lieberman T echnology is everywhere today—in our homes, our offices, our pockets—enhancing our lives in ways big and small. The same is true of healthcare institutions, which are investing heavily in electronic health records (EHR), voice recognition technology, documentation storage solutions, claims management tools, reporting and analytics platforms, and more. All of this tech in healthcare, however, is vastly underused. Just like how we may walk around with a professional-grade camera on our phone but never take a decent photo, employees in healthcare organizations are not making the best use of their technology. How healthcare organizations are underutilizing Epic EHR After working with healthcare applications for almost 30 years, I can say that many healthcare organizations have a lot of untapped potential in their current tool sets. A good example of this is Epic EHR, which is a very widely used—and underutilized— tool in healthcare institutions. There are several areas in which healthcare institutions are short- changing their use of Epic: • Patient engagement: Epic comes equipped with the MyChart patient engagement tool, which has frequent enhancements. While most organizations are familiar with MyChart, their knowledge of what it can do is often outdated. For example, most of MyChart's features—such as scheduling, electronic check-in, queuing, automatic waitlists, electronic questionnaires, and integration with location services and telehealth visits—are now available to users without a MyChart account. This open accessibility makes the tool much more powerful, but only if healthcare organizations know how to use it in the most robust way. • Population health and value-based care: Epic also comes equipped with population health and value-based care tools such as preventive care protocol orders, care management options, eligibility feeds, appropriate diagnosis guidance, and analytics. But without a solid understanding of these capabilities and how to use them, care teams can't take advantage of all Epic has to offer. This often leads to manual workarounds or multiple tools, which add costs and technical complexity. • Billing automation: The same goes for billing automation tools. Billing automation has been a major focus area for Epic and other revenue cycle vendors, which put out changes with almost every release. These updates are designed to make it easier for staff to understand the billing process and for patients to understand their bill, yet providers still often don't use these options to their full potential. While accurate and timely billing has always been key, healthcare organizations also have to be a lot smarter about the tools they use to support the billing process. EHRs and other core healthcare applications are always adding new features and improving the existing ones, yet healthcare organizations—lacking knowledge about the latest capabilities— are often too quick to seek new tools to perform tasks that existing tools could handle. Such duplication is like a homeowner buying a top-of-the-line stove with an air fry setting and then purchasing a countertop air fryer because they don't realize the stove comes equipped with this function (or don't feel like bothering to learn how to use it). How to make the best use of your health IT Below are recommendations for how healthcare institutions can keep current with their core products and get the most out of their health IT investments. • Meet regularly with vendors to understand future direction and share top priorities. • Schedule times when operational teams can view the product direction and give feedback (preferably in line with budget cycles). • At least annually, develop formal roadmaps based on the product direction and core organizational goals. • Set planned release cycles well in advance—a common practice in development shops but less common for standard healthcare vendor applications. • Have a process for collecting information about how people use the tools and what they need, which can guide the release process and inform/influence vendors. There is a time and place to add new vendors to meet specific needs, but now more than ever—with financial resources strained across the healthcare sector—we owe it to our organizations to get the most out of the significant investments they've already made. Providers should embrace the discipline of understanding their tools and build roadmaps for discovery, enhancement, and usage to get the best out of the tools they own and avoid duplication in their health IT investments.

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