Relying on clean, integrated EHR data with focused performance analytics can help you maximize incentives and provide the decision support tools and confidence needed for risk-based contracting.
d2i focuses on cleaning, integrating, and enriching EHR data to provide actionable analytics you can trust.
A recent study has shown that even the simplest Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems can complicate matters by being time-consuming and prone to errors, thus contributing to physician burnout.
As the health care industry moves toward a value-based system, regulations change and expand. To earn MIPS incentives and avoid penalties, health care organizations (HCOs) must collect and analyze more data. These requirements often add to the amount of time and burnout associated with EHRs. d2i not only can help optimize performance on MIPS measures but also ensure that data is accurate and complete.
How EHRs’ Usability Impacts Their Safety
The study, published last July in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), showed “wide variability in the usability and safety of EHRs,” from prescribing medications to ordering tests. The study showed that while physicians and residents performed some tasks without any issues, other tasks took substantially longer and resulted in errors, like prescribing the wrong dosage. The study authors argue that the consequences could range from being wasteful, for instance, ordering unnecessary testing, to devastating, such as ordering inappropriate and potentially fatal treatment.
Why EHRs Are Flawed
According to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, physicians in the United States spend four times longer on clinical notes than doctors in other countries. Doctors are required to spend more time generating clinical information than they’d like, particularly on compliance and reimbursement documentation, things that typically aren’t part of a doctors’ workload in other countries.
In the U.S., EHRs are complex by design. They require additional clinical and nonclinical information necessary to comply with regulations, as well as for billing and quality measurement. So, it’s understandable that many physicians view EHR maintenance not as a way to improve care, but rather as a burden that wastes time that could otherwise be spent treating patients.
How can EHR usage be improved?
There’s a call within the industry for collaboration between clinicians, vendors, and IT departments for more checks and balances, and for providers to invest in data analytics systems that can detect, analyze, and remove errors. Safety issues come from not just technology but stem from human error, so any solution must involve EHR workflow and data capture methods.
Relying on Your Data With Confidence
Your organization must be able to rely on its data for the sake of patient care and to ensure regulatory compliance. EHRs often include incomplete and “dirty” data, but having your team spend inordinate amounts of time auditing and cleaning the data in order to use it adds to the frustration. Worse still, simply dumping data from an EHR into an enterprise data warehouse can lead to inaccurate analytics and misinformed decisions.
d2i focuses on cleaning and integrating EHR data to enhance and curate it to make sure you can trust your analytics. Choose a qualified registry partner and we’ll gather all the data, evaluate it, help you decide the best measures to report, and feed information directly to the CMS registry on your behalf.
Our Performance Analytics Application can help you improve coding practices, monitor resource utilization, identify outliers, and reduce practice variability. The improved end-user experience and support from our Client Success Team can also relieve physician burnout and lead to better patient outcomes. Contact us or schedule a 30-minute demo to learn how we can help you navigate an ever-evolving world of quality reporting and rely on your data with confidence.