Read this whitepaper published by FierceHealthcare to learn more about how to use an EMR to help focus business and clinical operations, improve outcomes and better engage patients in healthcare decision making, including Insight into how well a practice cares for its patients Driving collaboration among providers and between providers and patients Leveraging integration between EMR and practice management solutions Monitoring and reporting on quality measures to better engage patients and families

1. P u b l i s h e d by F i e rc e H e a lth c a re
C u s to m P u b l i s h i n g
Managing the Transition to
the More Effective EMR
Arthur, a 66-year old-year retired electrician was
diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at age 62. Recently
widowed, he’s struggled to control his risk factors,
keep track of multiple medications and arrange
appointments with his primary care physician,
endocrinologist, nutritionist and podiatrist. That
all changed when Arthur’s primary care physician
installed an electronic medical record (EMR) system.
For the first time, Arthur was able to access at least
a portion of his personal health information, includ-
Improving
ing demographics, progress notes, problems, and
medications, vital signs, past medical history, immu-
Patient
nizations, laboratory data and radiology reports. As a
result, Arthur can better manage his risk factors, short
circuit complications and prevent trips to the hospital
Outcomes emergency room.
through a More Arthur isn’t alone in experiencing dramatic changes
in lifestyle and health through use of an EMR. Using
Effective Electronic EMRs instead of paper files has the potential to
improve care for diabetic patients by boosting com-
Medical Record munication, according to a September 1, 2011 study in
the New England Journal of Medicine. After analyzing
the medical records of more than 27,000 adults who
received care for diabetes at clinics in the Cleveland
area, researchers determined that diabetic patients
improved faster at medical clinics that had made the
switch to e-records.
Despite positive results related to EMR usage, ques-
tions remain. How can physician practices best use
EMRs to focus business and clinical operations,
s p o n s o r e d by
improve outcomes and engage patients in healthcare
GE C e n t r i c i t y P r ac t i c e S o lu t i o n
decision making? Physician practices face multiple
challenges ranging from the high costs of information
technology (IT) maintenance and the data tidal wave,
to reliance on EMRs as charts and “siloed” information
repositories and incomplete clinical decision support
(CDS).
Truly effective EMRs offer physicians insight into how
well a practice cares for its patients. Such insight
calls for a blend of tools that inform diagnostic and
treatment decisions at the point of care, facilitate col-
laboration among providers and between providers
 Improving Patient Outcomes through a More Effective Electronic Medical Record

2. and patients, achieve integration or remain integrat- on whether or not patients had completed hemoglo-
ed with a practice management solution, monitor and bin A1C tests within the last six months. Likewise, if a
report safety and quality and engage patients and patient’s blood pressure was too high, CDS within the
families. EMR would recommend medications needed to man-
age blood pressure in the context of diabetes.
Effective EMRs also reach beyond information retriev-
al to intelligence grounded in information, according “When an EMR functions with a dashboard, physi-
to Dr. Jon D. Morrow, Senior Medical Leader and cians get specific, quantitative feedback on guideline
Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC) use,” says Dr. Dente. “And that, in turn, makes it eas-
Director, GE Healthcare. Instead of merely replacing ier and more natural for physicians to integrate best
paper, these EMRs “leverage information to enhance practices into their workflow.”
knowledge through computer based intelligence and
decision-making support, linking information from Ideally, physicians want intelligence about the appro-
one EMR to the information in another.” priateness of a medication in light of a patient’s
hypertension, COPD, diabetes or CHF, says Mark
Clinical Intelligence and Blatt, M.D., Director of Global Healthcare Strategies,
Insight via the EMR Digital Health Group, Intel. For example, if a physician
Clinical insight should come through dashboards that decides to prescribe a hypertensive, she wants to
report performance on key metrics for Meaningful know the best drug or cocktail of drugs to address a
Use (MU), as well as real-time feedback on how phy- patient’s condition. And she wants the information to
sicians manage patients against guidelines, including emerge on a single screen, freeing her of the burden
those with chronic conditions like diabetes, chronic of flipping through multiple EMR screens or paper
obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or congestive charts. .
heart failure (CHF),.
Dr. Morrow sees EMRs anchored in increasingly
For example, if a guideline indicates that a diabetic complex levels of clinical intelligence, including the
patient needs a hemoglobin check every six months following:
with a result no greater than one percent above the
upper limit of normal, the dashboard should report Reactive intelligence and alerts: Alerts inform physi-
how well each physician within the practice performs cians that a patient is allergic to a medication or that
against that metric. the patient is already on a medication that would like-
ly interact with a newly prescribed medication. “With
“Instead of functioning as a penalty, dashboard feed-
back should empower individual physicians to change
their behavior, while prompting the sharing of best
practices among physicians who are typically eager
to learn how they stack up against their colleagues,”
says Mark A. Dente, MD., Chief Medical Officer, GE
Healthcare IT.
While the dashboard component of clinical insight
functions is what Dr. Dente calls “a speedometer
for physician performance”, clinical decision sup-
port (CDS) functions as a kind of “global positioning
system,” providing day-to-day guidance on how a
physician should diagnose and treat patients. Stated
another way, the dashboard identifies areas and
strategies for improvement, while CDS influences the
interaction between the physician, patient and orders.
For example, the dashboard might identify prob-
lems related to the hemoglobin A1C test for diabetics.
Once a practice introduced a diabetic form with built
in decision support, physicians could receive alerts
 Improving Patient Outcomes through a More Effective Electronic Medical Record

3. To read more, please click here to download.
Thank you for your interest.