Wednesday, March 6, 2013

My Top Healthcare IT Concerns for 2013


It's HIMSS week and IT professionals are gathering in New Orleans to find the products and services that solve their application and infrastructure problems.

What are my top healthcare IT concerns during HIMSS week 2013?

1.  Achieving Meaningful Use Stage 2 - at BIDMC we've already exceeded the hospital thresholds for the core and menu set measures of MU Stage 2 per this dashboard, except for electronic medication administration records/bedside medication verification, which we're implementing now per this project plan.    To attest this Fall, we'll need to complete self certification of our application suite (we build and buy so our approach to certification is to use CCHIT's EHR Alternative Certification for Healthcare Providers "EACH" program for all our enterprise applications.)   Once we complete hospital and eligible professional certification, we'll ensure all our stakeholders are educated about the changes we've made in functionality and workflow.    We're on target for an October 1,2013-December 31,2013 reporting period and we have no dependency on vendors since we've created the key software ourselves.

2.  Implementing ICD-10 including clinical documentation improvement - per yesterday's blog the entire organization is focused on several work streams - Technology, Payer/Contracting, Workflow/Computer assisted coding, Education/Clinical documentation improvement - that are needed to make the ICD-10 project successful.   It's not enough just to retrofit systems to capture longer/more complex codes.  The entire approach to documentation and billing must be changed to ensure sufficient detail is captured to justify the codes selected.

3.  Supporting ACO Needs - When I ask stakeholders what they need to be successful in managing Pioneer ACO global capitated risk contracts, they tell me they need an omnibus care coordination and analytic platform that consolidates data from all sites of care during the patient's lifetime to enable care management and real time decision support.    Basically it's HIE plus analytics, but no one knows exactly how it should work and few mature products are available in the marketplace to meet these needs.  Hence the reason, we'll need to build the Care Management Medical Record.

4.  Fulfilling all compliance/regulatory requirements including the new HIPAA rule - In a world of more mobile devices (BYOD), cloud computing, and increased HIPAA enforcement, it's challenging to share more data with more people for more purposes while at the same time keeping it secure.  We have 14 work streams to enhance our security maturity including many enhancements that will go live over the next 90 days.

5.  Managing levels of employee stress - implementing Meaningful Use Stage 2, ICD10, Accountable Care, Compliance requirements, and keeping the operational trains running  day to day puts enormous stress on staff at all levels.   Balancing the scope of projects, the resources required, and the timing which keeps staff excited but not overwhelmed requires continuous course correction.  Try finding that product at HIMSS!

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