Welcome to Vijilant. We are dedicated to providers, administrators and institutions who struggle with the Health IT challenges facing the healthcare delivery system. Today we must comply with an ever-increasing, wide-ranging, and often poorly coordinated body of requirements to deliver and receive payment for patient care. Stakeholders argue that the cost of compliance with these requirements , and longer term effects such as increased physician burn-out, are a significant obstacle in making the health care system more efficient, increasing quality of care for patients, and improving patient safety.
The burden of Health IT and specifically EHRs are certainly one aspect of the problem. Over the last decade, health IT use has dramatically changed the practice of medicine and clinical care in the United States. Wide-spread implementation of of Electronic Health Records systems have given physicians unprecedented access to information about patients and enabled clinicians in other health disciplines across the health care system to increase efficiency when electronic solutions have replaced cumbersome paper-based processes. Yet there is a growing consensus that, while it has made an unprecedented amount of information about patients available to them, technology has yet to make the practice of medicine easier for physicians and other health care professionals.
Clinicians and other health care providers argue that the EHR has introduced new challenges or failed to address existing ones despite intending to improve the practice and experience of medicine. There are extreme challenges with EHR system design and the regulatory and administrative burdens associated with the use of EHRs. These challenges occur during care delivery, required reporting activities, and documentation of claims for payment. The results are negative impacts that affect productivity, increase organizational cost, and detract from patient focus, resulting in negative experiences using health IT.
Moreover, there are also many problems adjacent to EHR and health IT. Severe cybersecurity breaches have occurred in nearly all physician practices across the United States. Beyond practices, highly publicized breaches have occurred. Healthcare delivery organizations need advisory assistance in navigating this explosive environment from IT, legal, and board governance perspectives.
New health IT systems have detracted from the patient experience perspective. A newly-empowered patient uses social media to grade their encounter experience and will not tolerate wait times or awkward patient flow hand-offs and will lash out at providers when they feel abused. While it was thought that EHR investments would help with these workflows, in most cases it has made the patient experience worse and new ways of moving patients through the continuum of care must be adopted.
How are small and medium healthcare delivery organization suppose to navigate these challenges? Well, there are not easy answers to be fair. But asking for help from well-credentialed and experienced service providers is the first step.