In November 2023, Healthcare IT news posted a success story highlighting Phoenix Children’s homegrown application and data warehouse. But there’s more to the story than that, said Dr. Vinay Vaidya, the health system’s chief medical information officer.
Vaidya says the key to an organization’s successful app and dashboard development lies at the beginning of the process. Before he and his team could deliver impressive results from dashboards and apps, he first had to convince clinical staff that if they spent the time entering necessary data into electronic health records death – a typical procedure that most doctors consider difficult to perform. cumbersome and a waste of time – his team will deliver valuable results and positively impact their patients.
So, following our previous profile story, we interviewed Vaidya on the topic of changing physicians’ perceptions about data entry and motivating them to fully participate – a major obstacle facing many organizations. Healthcare is still trying to get by without success.
Q. EHRs are often viewed as a burden on physicians, contributing to early burnout and cynicism. What is your opinion on this important issue?
ONE. EHRs are often viewed as an additional burden on providers with little direct benefit to them or their patients. Often, the EHR is cited as a significant cause of physician burnout.
Such a narrow, one-sided view can easily cause hospitals, health systems, and providers to lose sight of the real reason to move from archaic, paper-based charts to EHR documents and the enormous potential these systems offer to enhance patient outcomes.
However, the “potential value” of an EHR does not magically translate into the realization of actual clinical benefits. Converting this untapped potential into a meaningful impact on patient outcomes requires a carefully crafted strategy with the active participation of health IT leadership as well as clinical leadership. Clinicians and frontline doctors work in parallel.
After actively engaging and implementing such an approach at Phoenix Children’s, both our physicians and administrators are now deriving value from EHR data. We’ve weathered endless cycles of “EHR optimization” that yielded minimal results. Instead, we focus on capturing only the most essential data elements in the EHR that can provide valuable insights, helping our providers identify gaps in care and optimize Optimize patient care.
When used effectively, the EHR will overcome its reputation as a necessary evil, becoming a powerful electronic platform for coordinating care, stratifying patient risk, and managing patient populations holistically. can instead of individually.
Ask. You say your physician colleagues don’t feel burdened by your EHR. They feel empowered. Why is there such a big difference in how most doctors feel?
ONE. Like many healthcare organizations, we also experienced growing pains during the early stages of EHR implementation more than a decade ago. There is virtually no doubt or debate that EHR documentation often requires more time and effort. Doing the right thing often requires extra effort, whether it’s eating healthy or choosing to take the stairs.
But to continue doing the right thing, one needs to receive positive feedback on tangible results that justify the extra effort – and using an EHR is no different. Expecting providers to put in more effort without delivering a meaningful clinical return on investment is a losing proposition.
From the beginning, our goal was not just to meet basic operational needs but to go beyond them by transforming the EHR into a tool that significantly enhances clinical decision making.
About seven years ago, we committed to a focused effort to fully realize the promise of EHR. This means not just collecting data, but ensuring it is clinically meaningful, easily accessible, and optimally organized to support healthcare excellence.
During this period, we launched more than 50 clinical dashboards that provide actionable, real-time data to frontline physicians and care coordinators. This approach has transformed our EHR system from a perceived burden to a powerful asset for our medical staff. When healthcare providers see clear, tangible benefits from the tools they use, such as improved patient outcomes and streamlined processes, the value of the investment of more effort will become apparent.
Therefore, differences in attitudes toward EHRs in our organization compared to others are possible comes from our proactive stance of continuously improving the relevance and utility of our systems, ensuring our suppliers feel empowered rather than burdened.
Ask. Please share a good example of physicians at Phoenix Children’s asking for specific customized insights about their patient population and how the team delivered those insights, even if it meant Enter more data.
ONE. Our team begins chronic disease management with juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Working very closely with the clinicians, I participated in their weekly pre-visit planning to understand where we could self-inject to improve their understanding and outcomes.
Before that, they imported them all data in the EHR, but their information is not easily accessible and does not look at the entire patient population to better understand gaps in care, serious and non-serious diagnoses, or the extent to which we control Arthritis by provider site and systemwide.
We start by extracting data in simple reports, which is more efficient than reviewing the EHR patient by patient. We then added visualization tools along with our data to launch the initial dashboard.
That was in 2017 and since then we’ve built over 50 of these dashboards across the business and have expanded the program so we’re using these dashboards for almost every aspect of the organization. from operations to clinical care.
Ask. Please share one more such example to demonstrate your data entry point.
ONE. More recently, we helped solve a complex problem of improving outcomes for premature infants by engaging not only Phoenix Children’s physicians but also physicians working at multiple hospitals. and other clinics in our service area.
All premature babies who spend time in the NICU undergo retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) screening, which includes one to three exams over a period of one to three weeks, as most complications result from ROP. does not arise until four weeks after birth.
There is a small window of danger and an equally small window of opportunity. This screening helps determine if the baby needs additional treatment to prevent scarring, retinal ectasia, and even retinal detachment that can lead to blindness.
Doctors often bring paper screening documents to the ophthalmic nurse, who is responsible for processing those notes and updating manual processes to track which patients need screening and when.
We created a dashboard to eliminate that manual process and the potential for missed screenings through automated alerts and emails sent to neonatologists indicating which patients meet the screening criteria , when the examination was scheduled for each patient and the number of days since they were last examined.
Because this feature is available to neonatologists at Phoenix Children’s and other hospitals, it analyzes data not only from our EHR but also from eight other hospitals.
We rolled out this feature in October 2023 and it was well received by our physicians as they once again reached out to us to resolve this issue and trusted us to develop a more efficient process to improve care.
This solution is a win-win because it reduces the chance of missed screening and saves doctors time. Overall, we’ve done it, and we’re finding that physicians are approaching us with big ideas more often now instead of the other way around.
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