Why implementing EHR systems still Worried with Danger

The often-mentioned issues to the implementation of electronic health record (EHR) systems aren’t what healthcare providers say they are. Why implementing EHR systems are still filled with risk and danger?

That is the finding of researchers from the institute of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health who observed data from the American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey Information Technology Supplement.

“Several people were saying that the biggest issues for implementing EHR systems were the purchase price and meeting the Meaningful Use requirements,” claims Eric Ford, professor and associate department chair at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “While those are the most usual uncertainties, that does not essentially mean they are the largest concerns in terms of being actual issues.”

Researchers utilized a novel analytic method—called item response theory (IRT)—to measure the intensity of difficulty that specific issues pose in implementing EHR systems that meet Meaningful Use requirements.

In accordance to Ford, IRT is a collection of modeling techniques for observing item-level data gained to measure variation between respondents.

What IRT disclosed from AHA’s Annual Survey were importantly different results from descriptive statistics in assuming the magnitude of specific EHR implementation issues. Particularly, researchers founded that “gaining physician cooperation” and “ongoing costs of maintaining and upgrading systems” were the most challenging implementation problems for providers, instead of “upfront capital costs” and the “complexity of meeting Meaningful Use criteria within implementation timeline” referred by the survey.

Results of the research were released this week in the American Journal of Managed Care. AHA officials weren’t instantly present to comment on their survey results.

“Various surveys of hospital administrators have sought to recognize hurdles to the Meaningful Use of electronic health record technology. Although, the surveys used often lack the precision to give a list of hurdles ordered from most difficult to least difficult. Rather, surveys tend to report the most usual or famous hurdles to adoption,” states the article. “However this approach is likely to capture how common a problem is among hospitals, it doesn’t explicitly address how difficult a particular challenge is.”

Based on the results of his team, Ford asserts that hospital administrators require spending more time working with their clinical staffs to ensure that the EHRs meet their requirements and that they are rightly trained to make the best use of the systems.

When it comes to getting clinician buy-in, the researchers suggest that doctors and nurses should be brought in at the earliest stage possible of implementing EHR systems.

Moreover, Ford believes the other issue that has been immensely underestimated is the ongoing cost of EHR ownership.

Ford notes that the significance of handling ongoing ownership and operating costs for EHRs is often not completely understood by organizations until after they start their implementations.

“Post-EHR implementation, health systems have to roll out extra functionalities to meet organizational requirements and comply with ever-increasing regulations,” the researchers summarize. Although, public policies that give rewards for implementing more sophisticated EHR functionalities can be tailored to ameliorate these issues, they argue.