Seven chief innovation and digital officers from hospitals and health systems across the U.S. share the tools on their EHR wish lists.
Question: If you could add any tool to your EHR tomorrow, what would it be?
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Daniel Durand, MD, chief innovation officer at LifeBridge Health (Baltimore): If I could wave a magic wand, it would be deep integration between the structured and unstructured data fields within the EHR in quasi real-time availability with really deep machine learning tools so we could look for actionable trends, whether it's patients that are deteriorating or spending, marketing or diagnostic trends.
Omer Awan, chief data and digital officer at Atrium Health (Charlotte, N.C.): Cognitive computing tools.
Lisa Prasad, vice president and chief innovation officer at Henry Ford Health System (Detroit): A tool to integrate and improve revenue cycle operations with clinical operations.
Aaron Martin, executive vice president and chief digital officer at Providence (Renton, Wash.): The good news is that I can add any tool to my EHR tomorrow because that's what [our digital health tools prescribing platform] Xealth does. We have the ability to integrate pretty quickly new technologies on the fly; we stood up a remote patient monitoring platform in a matter of about three days.
Peter Fleischut, MD, senior vice president and chief transformation officer at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (New York City): Any tool to make healthcare less transactional. So anything that would make it more end-to-end, like a digital experience going throughout the continuum. I think healthcare continues to be transactional. You will see a doctor. You will see a nutritionist. You will see a wound therapist. You will see a social worker. So, I think the tool would be anything that would make the experience less transactional, less episodic and more end-to-end digital, so a patient can navigate through the system seamlessly.
Muthu Krishnan, PhD, chief digital transformation officer at IKS Health (Burr Ridge, Ill.): The ability to extract patient care data fully in a standard form for me to use with another EHR or processing by oneself. The fact that EHRs are so locked down is frustrating. None of the ERPs locked down access like EHRs have done.
Nick Patel, MD, chief digital officer of Prisma Health (Columbia, S.C.): Ambient Dictation Services and AI logic.