In this video, Rick Schooler, senior vice president of information services and CIO of Orlando Health, shares his experience with EHR implementations and the value of meaningful use with the editor of www.whatismeaningful.com. This interview is the first of a two-part interview with Schooler. Below is the video and a transcript of the interview.
What is Meaningful Editor: Orlando Health used consulting services to redesign workflow processes. Give us your thoughts on how that’s been meaningful in your end-user adoption success.
Rick Schooler: Implementing electronic health record in any setting – large health systems, small hospital, even physician office – is a daunting undertaking. There are very few people in the country who have a significant amount of experience doing this and there are organizations that have been greatly successful as well as organizations that have, you know, failed miserably. It is a very difficult…it is a very challenging journey. And it’s one that doesn’t happen over night…it happens over years.
And often times, particularly as organizations move into this kind of technology platform, they’re just not equipped with the appropriate skill sets to be able to accomplish what needs to be done. There are so many things that have to happen simultaneously. There are so many technologies that get introduced. There are so many workflow changes that have to be made. There is so much expertise medical as well as technical that has to be applied to make this happen so getting to a meaningful outcome requires that the appropriate resources are applied to secure a successful implementation as well as adoption and then ultimately be able to take those technologies and systems that are improving the way we deliver care and learn from them and to be able to apply them to get better.
So, without the help of external resources, particularly the folks who know the product, and that know healthcare and know the process – to be able to come in and help an organization, even our size and those smaller and those bigger, is very valuable because you will not get to meaningful in terms of an outcome unless you do it right and there are many ways to do this wrong…but there are not very many ways to do it right.
WIM Editor: From an IT perspective, are you seeing any difference in what you’re doing? A competitive edge that gives you an advantage over another hospital?
Schooler: I think a few years ago there was a lot more competitive advantage in sort of being there first, adapting that latest technology, getting on board early, being the first to market if you will with a given technology. Over the last several years, I believe, things have… not that they’ve become commodities but things have become much more a level of expectation. This is essentially the ante if you’re going to play this game. We believe the difference in terms of competitiveness and advantage has to do with how it’s done, the level of adoption and use by our physicians and our nurses and the way we use information so if I were to say is there one level of technology now that really does still represent a competitive advantage, I would have to say that once we get beyond the automation of process and the automation of day to day operations, be it clinical or business, it really is now the game and here we call that the “in game” of information warehousing and data mining.
Business intelligence is part of that but the ability to really understand your information, to bring together clinical and financial information, to bring all the different islands of data that exist, even after we’ve automated, into a platform that will allow us to learn from it and predict from it and to interrupt the things that we do day to day because of it and to make better decisions, both short term and long term, I think that’s where the advantage is where now. It’s in the use of all of the information now that we’re capturing because we’ve invested in the tools to automate operations. Now we’ve got the data. Like other industries, we now have that base information from which we can begin to make better decisions.
WIM Editor: What is the key to achieving meaningful use of technology?
Schooler: First and foremost, we’re sort of working from a document that is still evolving but it’s pretty much there at this point from the federal government about what is meaningful use. And so we can look at the different categories of goals and objectives and the different time frames and all the different aspects of what the federal government is going to determine with the help of a lot of very skilled people what is meaningful use.
As a CIO, our jobs are to ensure that those involved in our core business have the right information and the right tools and technologies to deliver the absolute best quality and efficient care possible. So, as we plan going forward, we’ll all be putting into our plans and our budgets the technologies and the resources and the changes we have to make in order to hit that, you know, the meaningful use criteria. And this has been, you know, a hot topic now for, probably nearly a year and there are so many people that have been talking about it and have, you know, been sort of throwing out the warning. You know, meaningful use is coming! And you must meet the criteria! And are you ready? Well, let’s face it. As we said earlier, it takes years to achieve what is being defined as meaningful use. If you’ve not started now, well down the path of implementation of electronic health records and the related technologies, you’re not going to be there next year. It’s such a large undertaking. But many of us, over the years, have been making the right investments and have been putting the right people and technologies into place to position us to be able to get to that level.
So when I hear meaningful use, to me, it’s a…on the one hand, it is a defined set of criteria that we’re all going to be asked to achieve and we’re going to have to verify that we’ve made that progress but if you back it up, you know, as something that is meaningful, it adds value and it causes you as an individual to want to continue in the case of technology to use it. So the things that we…that we have to do in our day to day work in putting these systems in place and keeping them running – those are given. We have to do what we have to do to meet the criteria. But, you know, it’s really a much bigger challenge…and it’s a much bigger subject than just meeting a list of criteria. It’s really all about doing what we as healthcare providers should be doing all along and that is to, of course, automate what can be automated, to make use of evidence based information that helps us deliver better care, to help us diagnose and to treat in ways that are most efficient and most productive and first and foremost that are…that are good for our patients.
So, meaningful use to me is…it is a defined set of criteria and we can point to a document that shows it but all of the things that have to happen in order to meet those criteria do not happen overnight…they take a lot of time and they take a lot of money to get to…and a lot of very skilled people that have to be very committed over a period of time – three, five or more years – to position their organizations to make those kinds of…of changes in the way we do things and the care that we deliver.
[End of of video transcript]
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