A bona fide tech strategy leads to EHR ROI
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A true technology strategy is rare. After all, isn’t nearly everyone’s de facto strategy to digitize and automate whatever processes they can, from appointments to claims to telehealth sessions to prescriptions and care plans?
Yes, for many of us. Others are content operating their health care organizations the old way, like we always have. A strategy worthy of the name, however, will strike a happy medium between digitizing everything and digitizing nothing. And it will deliver the best return. Let’s break it down.
Traditional tech selection
The common, tactical approach to procuring behavioral health technology is matching business problems or opportunities to software solutions marketed squarely at those problems/opportunities, then inviting some proposals. Too often, this approach fails to solve the problem it was created to address and, in fact, presents new ones. Tactical mindsets contribute to the failure of half or more of all electronic health records implementations (Gesulga et al.).
The better, far more successful approach is to develop a true 30,000-foot strategy that defines your organization’s needs, prioritizes them, considers a range of alternative solutions, implements them intelligently, manages the change, trains users well and gives your organization time to adopt, embrace and institutionalize the new, better ways of doing business.
Here are seven ways to turn good intentions into a successful technical strategy.
Sort your pain points
As one might ask of a patient, list your particular pains: for example, administrative burdens, blind spots, errors, duplication, wasted time, difficulty collaborating and lack of transparency. Pain points will be different depending on your particular organizational structure or mission.
Rate your pains from one to 10, then triage accordingly: What are your must-haves, nice-to-haves and can’t-affords right now? Also, limit the number of business processes you will change at any one time. Three or five is generally about right. It takes time to go from chaos to stability, so allot a year for new processes to work themselves into your practices and your culture.
Gauge your funding
Identify your obvious funding sources, then scour the landscape for grants and opportunities to share costs with peers, partners, nonprofits, governments or government-funded entities.
Compare your funding with your pain points and sketch out a phased plan, further prioritizing your needs and spending over the next 5 to 10 years (subject to change, of course).
Consider the integration burden
This is an important factor to get right. The more vendors and standalone technology solutions you have, the more time, money and effort you’ll need to spend on making them play nice together, and the longer that will take.
So, all things being equal, look for fewer solutions that will do a lot to solve your pain array, vs. niche solutions that each do their one thing well.
Think roles
For most behavioral health organizations, especially larger ones, technology solutions should generally adapt to individual roles and look very different for each set of users, for example, seasoned clinicians, administrative assistants, clerks, managers, human resources, finance and executives.
That does not at all mean you have to buy different products for each role; just ensure your investment offers you the configurability you need. On the other hand, don’t let the tail wag the dog and cater too much to a niche role. As a rule, systems will make you better.
Synthesize work into dashboards
One powerful element of a technology strategy is creating a useful home base for internal users, a single screen (two at most) where they can go to see everything that needs to be done.
Using these dashboards, employees can deal with all of the duties associated with their roles, including their to-do list, upcoming appointments, recently seen clients, open cases, prescriptions, lab results and care plans. Are your people constantly toggling among applications? That’s a sure sign you need to shore up your technology strategy.
Coach, train well
When a tech implementation fails, the problem is often not the software, but the change management, the communication to employees or clients, or the training. For major implementations, training should start weeks or months before the go-live date.
Look for a toolkit to help manage an important facet of implementation, which is how, what and when to communicate during the transitional period.
Communicate well
Change management is a challenge because there will always be resisters. The good news is that with a strategically sound project, there will always be eager, early adopters. Make it part of your strategy to spotlight the early adopters and their successes.
Celebrating success is just one element of a strategic communications plan for digital transformation, and everyone should have such a plan. Early on, leaders should clearly communicate to all stakeholders a rationale for the new technology. Repeat the messaging often, and in creative ways. Recruit those early adopters, showcase features and benefits, invite constructive feedback and listen well.
Staff and clients will adopt new technology when they understand that the new, technology-driven processes are how functions will be done going forward, the only way they’ll be done, that they create value and that cooperative employees will be recognized for their collaboration.
Admittedly, some technology pans out without a strategy behind it. That’s luck. Procuring technology without a strategy is a huge gamble. Strategists win more often. And winning means increased revenue, lower costs, higher employee and patient satisfaction, and better patient outcomes, which is what health care is all about.
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Khalid Al-Maskari is founder and CEO of Health Information Management Systems (HiMS), a Tucson, Arizona-based company that designs EHR software for integrated health care.