Related to my EHR Stimulus Tour participation, Nuance just came out with survey results on physicians’ interpretation of ‘meaningful use’. Nuance is the alliance member that provides voice recognition functionality to EHR solutions. This survey was also covered by BusinessWire.
The term ‘meaningful use’ was one of the open questions discussed during the tour presentation. Physicians will only be able to receive stimulus money if they are able to demonstrate meaningful use. HIMSS is scheduled to publish more details on what ‘meaningful use’ means. Prior to then, Nuance wanted to gather the thoughts of physicians on what it should mean.
A key survey question/response, “How concerned are you about the following obstacles regarding EHR adoption?” 90% are either "concerned" or "very concerned" about usability as a leading obstacle to EHR adoption – just a bit statistically significant. And this is where a social media element can bring together healthcare professionals and vendors involved in the implementation of these new systems.
With each solution being interoperable across networks and datasets, vendors should ensure access to secure, web-based communities. These communities can be application/solution specific, bringing together professionals with in the same functional roles but across health systems and geographic regions. With access to these communities, an individual or role specific team will not have to ‘go it alone’ through the implementation of new systems and processes.
I believe there can be great gains in developing ‘how to’ and ‘best practices’ communities across the various vendor solutions. From there, as community knowledge grows, vendor solution specific wikis can develop to supplement or eventually replace the help functions of these solutions. Examples of this across developer groups are many1 2 3 . We use forums like this across multiple applications: Firefox, MS Office, or Dreamweaver.
What will be key for adoption and use of this community based ‘how to’ tool will be creating a user interface that is both (1) easy to use, and (2) built within the workflow of the solutions being implemented and the workflow of the healthcare professionals’ day to day tasks.
What are key obstacles I have not considered? Can support communities improve EHR adoption among healthcare professionals?
Cheers - Eric A Siegmann
These communities can be application/solution specific, bringing together professionals with in the same functional roles but across health systems and geographic regions.
Kevin
Posted by: electronic medical records | 09/03/2010 at 10:14 AM