| | August 201919UTLOOK Healthcare Tech CIO INSIGHTSBy Patty Lavely, Sr. Vice President and CIO, Gwinnett Medical CenterLeveraging Technology for an Integrated Healthcare System In the light of your experience, what are the challenges you've witnessed happening with respect to the EMR/EHR space?One of the major challenges is around meeting the needs of all the stakeholders within the EHR. The stakeholders include the clinicians that need to enter and have access to patient information, the regulatory folks that are charged with meeting regulatory requirements, and the financial people that want to ensure we optimize the revenue cycle. Thus, it is a challenge for the vendors to develop products that effectively meet the needs of all stakeholders.For us, the focus has been around the workflow and on how to ease the burden on each of the stakeholders, especially our care givers. Another challenge around EHRs is maintaining a highly trained workforce so that they have all the knowledge they need to use the product. This takes time and investment to provide and maintain adequate training.We at Gwinnettare taking the next step towards advancing our training programs to ensure that we have a well-trained workforce across the organization. Training and education can impact adoption technology. With employed staff and physicians, adoption is directly related to education of how to use the systems and expectations on when to use the systems. Our community providers or those that spend little time in the hospitals, are more of challenge for education and adoption. Our health system requires the medical staff to use our information technology but we will still have some providers that write orders as an example. This breaks our automated processes and creates a hybrid medical record situation. Adoption of technology for clinicians is very important to our patient safety focus.We continue to look at innovative developments for EHRs. There are organizations that are ahead of the industry in leveraging innovation such Patty Lavely
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