Designing Quality into an EMR/CPOE Implementation

Session
Patient Safety and Quality

Author
Kristine Martin-Anderson
Principal, Booz Allen Hamilton

Description
Hospitals nationwide are struggling with increased demand for patient-level clinical data required to measure quality and patient safety. As the shift to P4P and public reporting intensifies, these demands are expected to escalate. This session provides advice for hospitals who wish to prove ROI of IT investments through quality improvement.

Abstract
When hospital executives make the decision to implement an Electronic Medical Record and Computerized Physician Order Entry system, they often expect that these efforts will increase the efficiency and timeliness of quality and patient safety reporting. However, it is simply not true that this benefit accrues to everyone. To get the desired benefits of 1) reduced data collection burden 2) better performance monitoring through "leading" rather than "lagging" indicators and 3) improved performance through the use of alerts for best practice, hospitals must carefully build quality reporting requirements directly into their EMR design. Further, they need a sustainable mechanism to keep the designs up to date as clinical evidence changes. This presentation reviews the experiences of hospitals who have both succeeded and failed in their efforts to move to real-time data collection for Core Measures and the Surgical Care Improvement Project. The success stories show that quality and patient safety are improved when care is managed concurrently. The lessons learned will be translated directly into recommended actions for those who are at the beginning, middle or end of an EMR or CPOE implementation.