How do you get physicians to use EHRs? As many early adopters and current implementers are finding, just making them available in the physician office, hospital or clinic is not going to cut it.
Best practices and lessons learned were shared on how to leverage the stimulus funding to accelerate EHR adoption at a recent World Congress summit in late May in Washington, D.C.
Partners Community HealthCare in Massachusetts found that deploying EHR use metrics kept their physicians from switching back to paper. Partners developed and scored three measures for EHR use - prescribing, problem lists and smoking status. Once the individual scores were reported, usage levels rose "significantly." The key is choosing meaningful, clinically important metrics and reporting them often.
Caritas Christi Health Care System in Massachusetts is trying to woo primary care physicians with a choice of two fully funded hosted EHRs, but with little luck. One thing the CIO of Caritas Christi has noted is that smaller practices are more concerned about integration of EHRs and their practice management systems than larger practices. The takeaway is that healthcare systems need to get involved with the integration of these two systems. It could mean the difference between adoption and the status quo for many of these smaller practices.
Along the same lines, another tip is ensuring the practice administrators are part of the adoption process. Practice and business managers run the office and are involved in the workflow. So their buy-in is the first step in achieving physician buy-in.
If you have any similar lessons learned or best practices for how your hospital got affiliated physician buy-in or how your small physician practice achieved EHR adoption, please share them. The pieces of advice given out at the summit are good ones. I'm sure there are more out there in the field.
Photo by petroleumjelliffe obtained by Creative Commons license.
