Overcoming barriers, physicians use EHRs in innovative ways

Even with the current limitations of electronic health records (EHR), Vanderbilt University School of Medicine has tapped into physician ingenuity to overcome problems with the technology and access the wide range of data available to improve patient care. When he got to Vanderbilt several years ago, Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, an anesthesiologist and AMA board member, created a team that was focused on helping physicians better use technology that was already at their fingertips. Two ways Vanderbilt is using EHR data “We have all of this data, we click buttons and check off boxes, and we enter in fields, but we never get anything back in return,” Dr. Ehrenfeld said. “The data lives somewhere, but nobody knows where it is, and nobody can get to it in a way that helps me take care of patients—that was the No. 1 complaint that I heard from my clinician colleagues.” As a result, Dr. Ehrenfeld’s team has been focused on developing approaches and infrastructure to “bring that data alive,” he said, “to make it actionable and allow our clinicians to use it to work more efficiently and effectively.” Here are two solutions he and his colleague Johnathan Wanderer, MD, have developed to assist in clinical decision-making: Tracking outcomes. “There is no shortage of quality reporting that happens at hospitals around the country,” Dr. Ehrenfeld said. “We, in fact, are drowning in metrics. There are CMS metrics … payer metrics, Joint Commission metrics...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news