While emergency departments are reporting an upswing in the number of patients coming in, ED managers and physicians say some of the complications and obstacles stem from information systems' poor usability and interoperability.
Here are seven findings on IT in the ED.
1. According to a Black Book survey, 89 percent of ED leaders said their hospitals rushed to purchase new EHRs and ED systems to satisfy meaningful use requirements.
2. As such, 35 percent of hospitals with more than 150 beds are either plan to or currently are replacing their ED information system.
3. Of those replacing their information system, 69 percent are opting for best-of-breed information systems that can integrate with the hospital's EHR to replace their enterprise EHR emergency modules, according to the survey.
4. "Most best-of-breed EDIS solutions, not all, are fine tuned for the emergency department environment and workflows," said Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book. "In contrast, enterprise EHR solutions have typically been very generic with difficult customization processes and long implementations for emergency departments."
5. Survey respondents were most dissatisfied with Epic's enterprise EHR solution's inability to integrate with best-of-breed EDIS solutions (86 percent) and inability to provide widespread connectivity to obtain external records (83 percent).
6. EDIS best-of-breed vendors T System and Optum received the highest ratings in user experience.
7. Cerner was the top ranked single source enterprise EHR/ED solution.
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