The challenges healthcare organizations face today are many, and they are constantly changing.
Over the past 100 days or so, we’ve seen profitable, elective surgeries drop by 70% and layoffs up to 75% in rural community hospital networks amid thin margins.
It’s a challenging time for the legacy healthcare delivery model. The right IT partner with expertise in delivering enabling, impactful technologies and services can help. Community hospitals need new ways to ensure successful IT implementations that free them to worry about what really matters most: patient care.
Here are three tips for those seeking to streamline IT implementations at hospitals with 100 or fewer beds:
1. Follow implementation methodologies that decrease time-to-readiness
During quick transitions, community hospitals must prioritize projects and talk with vendor partners about support they can expect. To help enable community hospitals to implement solutions, Allscripts uses its experience to collaborate with the customer to deliver a prescriptive, optimized, and evidenced based workflow. That achieves value faster. We try to shorten the time to deliver a solution based upon a broad experience base across many years of implementation experience.
2. Investigate the benefits of a cloud-deployed electronic health record (EHR)
You never have to question if your technology is working with a cloud-deployed EHR. Allscripts partners with Microsoft because of its high standards in protecting healthcare data. We use Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure tools for our Sunrise™ Community Care platform, a fully integrated EHR as a service platform for community hospital needs. This platform consists of:
• A cost-effective, industry-leading platform
• A deployment model that is easily managed
• An implementation and deployment led by Allscripts experts to ensure success
Our technology can quickly pivot to engage a community, especially as changing virtual health needs affect the patient journey. I think we will see a huge shift in what patients expect now that telehealth is so widely adopted. Our cloud solution enables a quick transition of visits to telehealth.
3. Achieve interoperability to prepare for future healthcare delivery challenges
The COVID-19 crisis has really emphasized how important it is to be interoperable. The ability for your EHR and vendor to enable open communication between different platforms where patients are expecting you to know their information is critical. It’s so important to have that data available wherever you go. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is going to be an important next generation of how we deploy tools on top of EHRs. Being able to have community engagement with telehealth and patient engagement from a mobile perspective is becoming paramount.
Your organization needs a fully supported solution that works with a single platform across clinical, financial and ambulatory care settings, so your care teams can get the right information at the right time, resulting in the right decisions. This is where Sunrise™ Community Care comes in. Learn more here.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Allscripts' website.