A survey of College of Healthcare Information Management Executive members found that since the majority of hospitals and health systems have invested in EHR technology, internal pressure on CIOs to realize value from their IT is ramping up.
"Significant money has been spent on these systems, and executives now want to see the tangible improvements in clinical and revenue cycle outcomes that were promised," the survey authors wrote.
Within the survey, optimization is defined as occurring before, during or after an implementation. For nearly all survey respondents, EHR implementation projects for their respective systems were completed more than two years ago, and members expressed mild satisfaction with the improvements their organization has seen thus far.
Here are four more key takeaways from the survey, "Realizing Value from an Enterprise EHR Investment," published by Impact Advisors.
• More than 70 percent of responding CHIME members agreed the top IT priority for their organization in the next 12 months is to realize more value from their EHR investment. Thirty-six percent agreed with this strongly.
• Only 8 percent of respondents said they are not focused on EHR optimization.
• Almost 75 percent cited too many competing priorities as one of the biggest challenges to getting more value out of their EHR. Only 30 percent cited budget concerns as one of the biggest challenges.
• Almost 75 percent of respondents plan to seek outside assistance from a services firm and/or their EHR vendor in addition to leveraging internal project teams for optimization.
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