Cybersecurity, reducing EHR burden, and innovation are the top three priorities for health system CIOs over the next several months, according to Penn Medicine CIO Michael Restuccia.
Becker's talked to Mr. Restuccia on Oct. 2 at Becker's Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference in Chicago to ask about the top focuses for health system IT leaders in the near future. Here are his answers:
Cybersecurity. It goes unsaid that cybersecurity is one of those top three. The provision of care is such an immediate service, so any disruption to that immediately impacts our patients, our clinicians, our delivery of care, our revenue. So we have to stay as safe as possible, trying to stay ahead of the bad guys and making sure we have a plan that introduces barriers and protections for our organization.
Reducing EHR burden. We're evolving into recognizing the burden that's been put on our clinical teams with the electronic health record. A lot of the work that is done in healthcare previously was done on paper. It was done by administrative staff. It was stored in areas that were unreachable, in folders and file cabinets, and that patient data couldn't be found. And the electronic health record has now brought that all together in a digitized manner. But it's now the responsibility of the care teams to enter and manage that data, and that's a burden they didn't necessarily have 20 years ago.
So how do we begin to eliminate and remove some of that burden? I think, through better clinical documentation tools. A big one for us will be working with our EHR vendor to test patient documentation summaries. At a large academic institution like Penn Medicine, we get patients transferred in all the time. We have existing patients who have seen multiple specialists, and their clinical chart is really thick with data. And when that patient sees an existing or a new clinician, it can take a long period of time for that clinician to weed through all the notes and try to determine what's important here: What do I need to know to best treat this patient? It's a little bit like Amazon when they put a summary of 782 reviews on a particular product. The general themes are it's high quality, lasts a long time, but, man, it is hard to put together. Well, I didn't have to read 782 to get that. How do we translate that into our clinical documentation, reducing burden?
Like many, we're testing out ambient listening technology to assist clinicians in having a general conversation with a patient, having that conversation be recorded and then translated into some type of meaningful note that then integrates seamlessly back into the electronic health record. And then there are a series of other things that are a little less technical, but we still need to support. So think about the work life of a clinician, of a physician, particularly in an academic center. Because we have a tri-mission: it's patient care, it's education, it's research. So they're always juggling their time. There is no eight-hour day for them. But if they then have to go home and document in the evening or be on call, it's an additional burden. Being able to utilize a centralized on-call service that we've introduced and take some of that burden off the clinician and really only call them on super serious things or meaningful things that they need to address, is a nontechnical way to reduce some of that burden. And that's all supported by technology.
Innovation. The third one is just being able to stay at the forefront of innovation and introducing new technology, whether it's leveraging the cloud or other types of technologies to improve care and make your health system more efficient.