Your organization has invested in a high-priced EHR system. Now, what exactly is your investment doing for you? In the current healthcare climate, organizations cannot afford to spend time, effort, or money on programs or systems that do not provide a competitive advantage or improve performance. While transitioning to an EHR satisfies regulatory and legislative mandates, organizations of all sizes also have a tremendous opportunity to maximize their IT investments and improve provider performance through metric-driven optimization.
Metric-driven (or data-driven) optimization is the deliberate process of mining your EHR database for performance measures and using this information to drive continuous performance improvement throughout the organization. Ultimately, executing well-designed strategies to integrate EHR-captured data helps organizations identify and reduce practice variability, achieve incentive targets, maximize pay-for-performance awards, and coordinate patient care within and across organizations, among other benefits.
Adopting a metric-driven approach to optimization in particular provides organizations with the ability to accurately diagnose and correct problems by evaluating performance across specific metrics.
A properly integrated and fully utilized system can establish the foundation for significant and sustained organizational improvements, particularly in practice efficiency, provider and patient satisfaction, and data quality.
How an organization manages EHR integration and utilizes data to optimize performance, as well as whom it turns to for support in this process, plays a pivotal role in determining that organization’s success. To learn more about metric-driven optimization, see the full article.
What issues are you seeing with your EHR system, and what data-driven optimization approaches are you considering?
Published November 26, 2013